Designed for despair

The emotional architecture that undergirds the entire ecosystem of harm: the delays, the silences, the polite betrayals, the shifting goalposts, the diagnostic suspicion, the endless meetings that lead nowhere, the gaslighting dressed up as concern. The systemic pattern that tells mothers their clarity is instability, that demands politeness while inflicting harm, and that rewards collapse with temporary reprieve. It complements designed to exhaust but reaches deeper—naming the psychic cost, the moral disorientation, the cumulative breaking. If maternal rage is the body’s protest, and epistemic silencing is the intellectual containment, then designed for despair is the affective strategy that binds them.