I believe that my current perception of the world is more objective than the average person's perception of reality. Life is a struggle for everyone, but a happy person would probably tell you that it is a beautiful struggle. Depressed people are unable to see the beauty in the struggle. They only see the overabundance of misery and pain in the world. My state of mind usually fluctuates between moderate depression to something that I would describe as neutrality. The neutrality is neither nether happiness nor sadness. I think it is the closest thing to perceiving an objective reality.
Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! There is no such thing as observing objective reality..
In my fair opinion, SSRIs do have a benefit for those people who truly are clinically depressed -- not just a depressed mood or general melancholy. For those who are truly depressed, the SSRIs do help alleviate feelings of complete loss, worthlessness, and the obsequious and difficult to handle crying spells. I have a distant cousin who is being treated with SSRIs after a couple of suicide attempts. She is now functioning normally with little to no risk taking behavior. Of course, ongoing therapy is essential. They are not "wonder drugs," but do work wonders compared to the older and more dangerous tricyclics. Learned
It's not that it's a beautiful struggle. The point is that There's more to life than that struggle. Even people who struggle have happy moments. Some of them have happy hours, happy days, or happy weeks. Some of the people who are living the struggle you observe are not as depressed about it as you are! What gives you the right to trash your precious life emotionally as a reaction to something that someone else does not perceive to be as dismal as you see it? Someone who would look at your life and say you've got every reason to be one of the happiest people on earth? You are making those people responsible for the misery in your life. Is that fair??? Could you, with your 28 teeth and your full belly and your inoculations and your education and your wallet full of photos of still-living children and the pink slip to your car, go to some beleaguered place in Africa, walk into some family's hovel during a moment when they happen to be enjoying themselves despite their condition, and tell them that because of them, you feel like shit? Do they deserve that? Indeed. What's wrong with learning to see the positive stuff like so many of the "miserable" people who depress you do? If those people can overcome the first-order effects of "the abundance of misery and pain in the world," don't you OWE it to them to try to learn how to overcome the second-order effects?
I think that pills combined with therapy will yield the best results. I agree that when viewed on their own, therapy would be better than pills alone.
What causes the difference? It is probably genetic predispositions. Some people are just naturally happier than other people. There was a time in my life when I was extremely depressed. I tried antidepressants and psychotherapy during this time. The antidepressant did help me, but I also experienced some bad side effects while I was taking them. And the idea of paying over $100 an hour to talk to someone about my problems made me even more depressed. I could have got more relief if I hired a masseuse to give me some happy endings. I would definitely be interested in some kind of new experimental treatment (something like gene therapy) that could help me cope with reality. I would love to have the genetic traits of the few people that seem to be able to cope with any amount of stress. I am also interested in things like TMS.
If these psychotropics were herbal medicines being sold in alternative stores, the side effects of these drugs would have long ago raised a public outcry for their banning. Articles would have appeared, the most strident about teenagers who abused them, and the FDA would rush in and ban them. Along with electroshock therapy. But because these drugs were made by the mainstream and big business the problematic side effects - which have included death, early death, murder and a host of minor to major problems - are considered exceptions, however common. Imagine if Echinacea had the history of side effects of Prozac. Church groups and legislators would be climbing over each other to condemn its distribution.
Let's take an extreme counter example. Afro-american slaves. Some of them, I am sure, managed to keep their spirits up better than others. Does this mean the ones who were depressed as slaves had an illness. There are problematic assumptions at the root of the current drug distribution mania. According to pharamceutical companies the majority of us are diagnosible and should be on some medication or other. What we have is a societal short cut, where we pathologize individuals immediately. We diagnose them, rather than seeing if the causes of their problems are in the family, in the school, part of a societal problem. We have cut out a powerful feedback mechanism - our own experience of living in these families, communities, society. And even if it turns out, after a little patience, that it is the best short term solution to medicate someone, telling them that they are having a normal reaction to a situation that is unhealthy is a significant context shift from the current 'your brain has a problem' analysis.
True, but people can make an attempt to not be influenced by their emotions when they’re making important decisions. Scientists do it all the time.
If you are making a decision where there are a lot of variables you need to use emotions or you can come up with reasons for a number of possible right actions or interpretations.
Indeed. Alcohol and tobacco are far more dangerous than most illegal drugs. "Illness" seems like a harsh word but there was certainly some important difference between them, wasn't there? You don't seem to have coined an alternative word for it yet. Well hey just because I think depression is a "problem" that people should not simply accept and plan to live with for the rest of their life, doesn't mean I recommend treating it with drugs. I know that's the title of this thread but many non-pharmaceutical treatments have good potential without dumping recently-invented chemicals into your body. Meditation, acupuncture, all kinds of Eastern approaches are worth trying, as well as some of the new Western ones like EFT. Hell, the first thing you should do is get a dog! They've been making humans happier for fifteen thousand years. Yeah yeah. If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Especially if you're the hammersmith, eh? Wait a minute. You already admitted there was a control group. Other people live through these exact same experiences without becoming depressed. So we've pretty much ruled out external causes and it really is time to look inside the patient. If you're talking about an abusive family, then of course that's different. But you keep talking about how painful it is to live in a world where you have to observe the struggle of Everyman against the injustice of Civilization. It's not generally your brain per se, at least not anything fundamental like its structure. It's your emotions, which are not down at such a deep level. Changing your emotions with drugs isn't nearly as drastic as rewiring your brain with them. Lots of people go out on Friday night with the express purpose of changing their emotions with drugs. "Mental illness" is real but relatively rare in the context of this discussion. Most of the people we're talking about here have an emotional illness.
. And with the internet and TV as gateway drugs. In a sense, yes. And as you suggested at the family. But I still have an issue with your position. Let's take someone growing up in Stalin's Russia. he is depressed. He finds life in that society depressing. Across the hall his neighbor thrives. He likes being told what to do. He likes being understimulated. He likes....you get the idea. Which one has an emotional problem and needs medication? I want, and I think many people want, a diverse society with many people who have different strengths and interests. Stick all the children, for example, in rooms for six hours where they have to sit still and be passive and learn passively, and suddenly you will find excuses to diagnose some of them. If however we, as a society, were more flexible, children who, for example learn best when they are physically engaged are less likely to be seen as having a brain problem. The fact that so many children are getting Ritalin and other drugs rather then we consider much more seriously the effects of the stress of the parents today the speed of society today the overflow of media and stimulation in general tired pedagogical techniques TV as babysitter Computers as social life center as possible causes. To give the individual kid who cannot sit still a drug is a short cut and it pathologizes that child. I do not think it is so easy to 'rule out external causes'. The ones who do not thrive may have skills and needs that are different but are not problems. Now they are pathologized. I find it amazing how harsh people judge self-medication and how easily they accept mass medication based on studies done by people who make money off the distribution of these drugs. I am biased. I had a family member diagnosed and medicated and it caused a lot of damage. It was PTSD and me, the child, was the one who had to explain this to everyone. I had to almost literally kick the asses of a bunch of adults who see pills as magic bullets and do not see the irony in that metaphor. The adult who was PTSD, once it was seen as this, went off the meds, and in that instant, no longer had an emotional illnes, but rather the normal emotional aftermath to trauma. No pathology. No problematic brain.
SAM i would have to say yes, actually im about to be put back on anti depressents probably for the rest of the time im at uni (i got told i have to take them for 6months before i even TRY to come off them). I guess i get to be a guinnie pig for the efficasy because i have a whole list to try. If one doesnt work (or effects my sex lifePlease Register or Log in to view the hidden image!) i am surposed to change to the next We will see
I'm always mystified when someone like you who is sitting here using the internet as a tool for communication and education makes a derogatory comment about it. I never visited the USSR but I spent some time in the satellite countries. I met people who had found peace and happiness, yet no one could accuse them of preferring to be "understimulated." They read books, went to the theater, played music, carried on correspondence with vast numbers of people in many countries (including the USA which is how I ended up there) and spent their evenings in passionate intellectual discussions with a room full of friends. So their jobs sucked and their homes were crowded and their politicians were selfish oafs. A lot of Americans feel the same way. As I said I'm not a strong proponent of medication. But like most people I think happiness is a natural state that we should all be able to attain during a large portion of our life. People who can't do that are the ones with the problem. It may not always be soluble, but nobody is going to convince Fraggle Rocker that being bummed out by the world one lives in should be adopted as a reference standard for a "normal" human existence and everybody else has a problem! Well you're rambling on about drugs and that is after all the subject of the thread. Nonetheless I think we can recognize that people have unpleasant feelings and it's possible to try to make them feel more pleasant without giving them drugs. That's a paradigm shift. Civilization is changing into a new format and virtual communication is becoming the norm. The upside is that we don't have to limit our friends and associates to people in the same country, but the downside is that we may never be able to meet them in person. As far as I'm concerned that's an exchange I'll make happily since I've always had more in common with foreigners than other Americans. Eventually video and audio will become ubiquitous so we won't be limited to the emotional bandwidth of typing, but we will get used to dealing with electronic avatars of people and it will become just as easy as telephony, despite the fact that my grandfather said people would never feel comfortable talking to somebody they can't see.
Prozac is great... for a little while. When it was working for me, I remember wondering if that was how normal people feel all of the time. But after a while, you gradually go back to normal (but still find it nearly impossible to have an orgasm). I suppose many people will up their dose, but I just quit taking it. I repeated the cycle once, but I don't know that I ever will again. I think for some it can help them over a rough period. But it won't make structural unhappiness go away.
That sounds like something that you would hear from motivational speakers like Deepak Chopra or Wayne Dyer. I don’t believe that human beings have a natural state, and I think it is unrealistic to believe that everyone should be able attain happiness during a large portion of their life. It would be possible in a better world, but not in the world that we live in. This world isn’t for everyone. We can’t all be winners in the game of life. Some people have a high probability of growing up to be happy individuals from the moment they are born, and other people are destined to live a life of misery. There are so many things in our lives that we can’t control. (Your genetics, the socioeconomic level that you are born into, who your parents are, the people that you met during your childhood) All of these things play a role in determining if a person will be happy or bummed out by the world that they live in.
You know me and I have told you that I take them and they work for me. That doesn't mean they will work for everyone but if the doctor can find the right type of medication perhaps that might be the way to help those who aren't being helped yet.
