Antidepressants: True Myths or Mythical Truths? [Mensa Greece, 32 2/10]
March 26, 2010 
10 Comments
Evangelos Katsioulis’ article Αντικαταθλιπτικά: Αληθινοί μύθοι ή Μυθικές αλήθειες? in 2010 on the Mensa Greece Journal issue 32 2/10. [article in Greek]
Wow, keep up the though provoking posts E.K.
Does chemical (drugs) and physical (surgical) force circumvent our built-in physiological feedback mechanisms? (viz. perform ethical/good action -> acquire desired result -> obtain serotonin/other chemical reward and consequent good feelings).
To what extent might such drugs encourage unethical behaviour? (blocking of guilt/”bad” emotions pursuant to unethical behaviour).
To the extent that anti-depressants enable patients to address the true causes of their depressed state I agree they may be a valid treatment.
On balance would you not agree that a workable understanding of how ethics, actions and conscience operate is a superior solution?
Raising humanity from unthinkingness should be the name of the game at present? Not multi-billion dollar proton games in Switzerland, nuclear weapons, plasma monitors, jet engines, pharmacology, derivatives and synthetic financial engineering etc etc etc…
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I’m of school and devout. My opinion is the font of my certainty and of it I would never doubt because to doubt it or to examine its competence would be to doubt myself.
Life is an abusing experience and who we are comes from surviving it. What we endure might undermine our complacency but that is what it does and that is how we learn; through facing up to such trauma and living through it.
It used to be called character building. It used to be your ticket to ride. Pain used to be an understandable consequence of living that you’d get burned a little and even damaged by it along the way. What’s more, I don’t buy the idea that we can cure the pain of life nor should we. Just like I don’t believe anyone ever gets a pristine ride, and that the ride itself is what forges us from our experiences.
In this regard a purist might argue your state of mind is all there is and what it is stands. That whether depressed or compromised, it is what it is so you find a way to live with it or make your way to a better state of mind. That this is life and that’s living and that is all we have.
The modern fad to psychoanalyse everything and attempt to cure it is utter nonsense. It could be argued that outside of physiological damage there is no such thing as mental illness. Drugs induce a lie within you. They belay your natural reactions thus state. They calm when you should perhaps feel agitated or frustrated. They numb you when you should be experiencing your pain. Yet there is no cure for life and so no true cure to its affect thus why would we want to subdue or sanitise our reaction to it or wish to make it more bearable?
Is that not how we rob ourselves of life’s cost and thus meaning?
It seems to me all the depression pill popping of the modern world is part of the way it maintains its own sociological imbalances that cause the social disease and vogue malady of depression. My mom use to say when I was fed up and glum that I had too much time on my hands and would get me off my ass to do some chores. And it usually worked. Of course I’d grumble about being forced to do something I did not wish to do, resentful of being denied my self-indulgent self-pity and woeful self-pondering, but by the time I had finished I would be in a much better mood so she was right.
Maybe things come to easy to us these days and perhaps we don’t pay an honest price for our dues, which is why we often end up feeling disillusioned and short changed. Perhaps the real mental illness of modern life is our constant need for an easier ride.
This attitude that you can buy and thus have everything, that you can make easier and more pleasant the harsh realities and that it is possible to cure pain or at least remove its sting through pills and forays in self-indulgence is what compounds our sense of malaise. The modern word of ease and gluttony and its provision is what causes our sense of mental and inner disquiet for it fosters dissatisfaction and the respect for superficiality. It provides and encourages vacant goals that grant vacant rewards. It creates the modern mind of the modern world that has too much time on its hands to over examine itself and find shortcomings. It removes too many thorns. It is designed to resolve and ease discomfort, and yet it is our discomfort that allows a gauge of price and thus value.
It is through the pain of what life cost that we learn its meaning.
We live in dangerous times my friend where the lives we live undermine our ability to grow as human beings. On some basic level the modern world denies us those things that reinforce our humanity where our inner anguish is our way of registering this.
Something I don’t experience because I don’t resent my pain. I face it head on. I want no easy ride. I want to see fully and not be blinded by the false beauty of a more easily arrange view. Let me see it all, including the ugly truth. And perhaps this attitude is the cure.
Indulging overindulgence must be the most absurd form
of its cure.
Get people to understand that life is what it is and how they live with it is up to them. Get them to realise there is no easy road and so Nirvana of happiness possible in real terms then perhaps people will finally stop lying to themselves and start seeing through to sociological bullshit that everything, including their perpetual peace of mind, is assessable.
And just to prove my point; the people who tend to suffer the most in life are those who see themselves as victims.
You mentioned morality and the way mental health issue treatments might grant a false register and possibly escape form responsibility that encourage immoral behaviour. But perhaps we should question whether morality is still relevant today?
I agree subduing the effects of our experience will give a false sense of things so to this extent you are correct to raise the connection. But modern life and its values are what foster our idea of right and wrong and a consumer based culture produces self-absorbed self-indulgent people.
Surely morality comes from a sense of accountability in regard to other people and their situation relevant to us? Life lived through self-service will breed self-serving people, people lacking the sense of concern to grant a moral perspective in relation to others.
When we properties our own priority in all things surely we lose our sense of proportion and context, the measuring tools that help us recognise our extravagances and thus our sense of limit and with it our sense of responsibility to see others just as fed. Without empathy we lack the ability to care sufficiently to understand or want to prioritise other people. The dogma of the self-serving consumer is to always take and yet in such a life we often find ourselves greatest robbed and left deficient.
When we don’t earn anything in an honest way we cheat ourselves even when we don’t think so even when we are sure this is how to be happy. When we concentrate on self-satisfaction to this extent we lose sight of the value found in self-sacrifice and delaying gratification. Over indulgence numbs us to the joy of gain and breeds contempt, contempt for things we achieve and thus contempt for our achievements where success and its satisfaction becomes an easy trade and the things we value feel given.
When something costs you little or does not ask too much of you it loses its sense of value. There is no test we can test ourselves against in a moral sense because everything from the way we behave to the way we connect comes from a prescription for success and thus happiness that depends on ease of gratification. The formula for who we are and how we live is already fixed in a value system that panders to our desires. We no longer question because we generally have what we want and a culture willing to provide more of it. We no longer feel accountable as so much of our lives is provided for where our part in this alliance is to simply accept and take. You can only be responsible when you initiate action. You can only be moral when you disadvantage your own priority to do the right thing to the benefit of someone else, especially when that choice involves personal cost.
Morality as become something of an interesting idea to be discussed on forums and within literature, perhaps even in the arts and on occasion amongst the scientific community, but all those realms of consideration are not thought of as being central to our culture or mainstream life. The bottom line for everyone comes down to the financial bottom line and our ability to pay for what we want in order to drive the economy of consumerism. Few of us bother to get up and do anything that doesn’t service us, either directly or indirectly. Even when we do what we consider unpleasant such as pay bills or go to work most of us do so obediently conducting ourselves like a drone whose true job is to function within the reality of the group in order to maintain the society that bread us and thus our way of life.
Modern life is a life so little from us because it panders our baser appetites and thus baser selves. It has become a world of the gratification designed to service the individual and thus ego where responsibility becomes the scope of how to please ourselves. Our morality becomes the guardian of our right to put ourselves first. It recognises greed and rewards it when we promote the exploitative values of capitalism that gives us our consumerism. Nowhere do I see anyone questioning the ethics of profit or over manufacture or the economics that support exploitation to feed greed or our ideology that maintains its extent and accessibility. The poor become an acceptable probability we calculate into our social equation. Crime becomes the behaviour of lack of compliance with the laws that create social injustice and maintain this socialistic narcissism.
So where is right and wrong and how do such concepts fit into our modern lives?
Our morality, if it still exists, is skewed. What we treasure has little of what is ethical to it. We use charity to forgive greed and readdress indifference so even what was once done for a good reason becomes the behaviour if the selfish done for selfish reasons. We no longer see the wrongs that use to haunt humanity. They have become forgiven and absorbed into our social consciousness as necessary evils to a productive society as the global economy expands providing a cultural formula that begets self-interest at its heart, from our laws to our expectation, from how we do business to how we recognise reward, from our government to our wars. Men no long fight for freedom or for a better way to live. They fight for oil and political power to demand more of it.
Morality seems to have become irrelevant. What wrongs that still abide will eventually be put right through the globalisation of consumerism that requires a prosperous citizen to make a successful consumer and so healthy market. In such a word democracy rules or what passes for social choice. In such a world the aim is to give everyone what they want so long as they are able to pay for it, be it through credit or employment.
See how the world wobbles on its axis when the banks promise to fail. Nothing short of nuclear war could have that affect on our planet.
And things evolve. The world becomes ever more proficient in obtaining its ends. The future economics will learn to provide the means to pay for the perpetual supply of demand if consumerism is to stay. It will eventually cure hunger by feeding greed. It will eventually do away with exploitation when everyone’s ability to buy what is manufactured becomes the priority. It will do away with social oppression for the same reasons, because as consumers we will become the thing that feeds the machine so it can to continue. In other words the prosperity of the individual will become paramount and the world redesigned to secure his wealth and rights.
But at what cost where will that leave our humanity?
What sort of world will it be when all we do is live to think of ourselves. Will the morality of that time be anything we can sympathise with? A world of well fed and catered for equals whose only social expectation is to consume and enjoy.
Perhaps morality only has relevance when not everyone has the same ability to consume?
Society in its economic hast to furnish the individual has placed the importance of the individual at its core. People don’t care for other people so long as they are doing fine. As long as they can buy their houses and cars and continue to earn the money they spend or get credit for when they don’t they don’t care what is happening elsewhere or to whom.
And outside of depression selfishness is the other great social disease of our time. The connection is inescapable.
Hi Quick.
I do not mention “morality”. I refer to ethics. Morality seems to be a consensus delusion. Social norms, rules and laws specific to the time, place and population. I view ethics within a framework of true cause and effect; from the standpoint of the individuals cognition, choices actions and effects.
An ethical act increases the survivalness of ALL (you, others, animals, plants, planet etc). An unethical act decreases it, on balance. The acts themselves may vary depending on circumstance, but the underlying goal will be a reliable constant.
It starts with the individual. It is not ethical to be unhealthy, uneducated, impoverished and unhappy. Capitalism is a pretty cool system for channelling selfish drivers into ethical outcomes. It is not perfect. It would not be needed if everyone acted ethically.
Happiness? I’ve bought lots of stuff in my life. At the office not long ago the cashier at the cafeteria undercharged me. When I went back and gave the guy the surplus cash his face really lit up.
To this day we always have a kind exchange of words and smiles whenever I purchase lunch from the cafeteria. That one act produced, and continues to produce more good feeling than virtually anything I have ever bought.
People live the consequences of their actions and (if they really played a bad game) begin to lose the power to be cause over their lives.
So, back to SRI’s – like a headache, if the “paracetamol” grants the clarity of mind to establish what is was that caused the headache and how to avoid its recurrence then good! If it simply results in repeated doses over and over whilst the cause remains unchecked then its rubbish.
Incidentally I think psychologists should pay more attention to practical cause and effect. Analogy: If I wanted tax advice and my advisor billed me for a meandering diatribe on the efficient market hypothesis or the governments fiscal equilibria I’d fire them.
PS – I disagree that life is some sort of torture chamber by design. There is happiness everywhere, but people choose to disregard it as unimportant.
Hi JC! And thanks for the interesting reply. Hope you don’t mind a belated response.
You said:
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I find little difference between either. Morality seems to be a consensus delusion. Social norms, rules and laws specific to the time, place and population I view ethics within a framework of true cause and effect; from the standpoint of the individuals cognition, choices actions and effects. >>
I see. Well yes, reality reflects our values according to what we perceive. You merely recognise the distinction.
To me it’s all the same and what we consider “true cause and effect” is only another way of defining our terms.
Ethics and what is considered ethical is whatever the one who recognises such particulars says it is. Like all perception it is subjective and thus always uniquely personal and so there is NO ‘higher’ truth or ‘truer’ quality to our existence outside of our idea of it and so no more essential authority for appropriate behaviour, in any sense, be it in social or personal terms.
As the wisest elves and those poor demons despoiled from hell’s perpetual grace do chant and promise, lament and say, “Truth, as does beauty, doth lie in the eye of the beholder” and I have yet to meet or hear of a better man than I or someone more appropriately human and so more appropriately saved.
As far as I know, and I know little, we are all on the same ticket to ride in limitations and flaws. No man is above the influence of his baser nature just as no man is above human weakness. Within our common biological inheritance and racial memories we have each travelled the same evolutionary path and so of the same persuasions and essentials, designed and contrived as those experiences demand.
Humanity has committed and survived a billion atrocities to arrive at where we are now and unfortunately we carry the legacy of every violation probably encoded within our basic selves–and where else would our sense of the ‘ethical’ come from or our nightmare and fears?
Irrespective of fine notions and the smugness of absolved ego, ultimately every man is as ruthless as circumstance command and I believe none of us exempt from the capacity to do great evil– to use a populist term.
Quick
Sorry I think you’re missing the point. Even if life is just a game with (badly) imagined rules and boundaries – you can still play badly or play well.
People still fail and succeed. Some live and perceive pain and confusion and meaninglessness. Some…don’t.
Those with high IQ can potentially play a far better game…. just pay no mind to how silly most of the rules are. Make better rules if you must.
Kind regards,
-CJ
Quick
Sorry I think you’re missing the point. Even if life is just a game with (badly) imagined rules and boundaries – you can still play badly or play well.
People still fail and succeed. Some live and perceive pain and confusion and meaninglessness. Some…don’t.
Those with high IQ can potentially play a far better game…. just pay no mind to how silly most of the rules are. Make better rules if you must.
Kind regards,
-CJ
Quick
Sorry I think you’re missing the point. Even if life is just a game with (badly) imagined rules and boundaries – you can still play badly or play well.
People still fail and succeed. Some live and perceive pain and confusion and meaninglessness. Some…don’t.
Those with high IQ can potentially play a far better game…. just pay no mind to how silly most of the rules are. Make better rules if you must.
Kind regards,
-CJ
CJ.
I agree. I don’t think I think like you. I see things differently and possibly hold other values, not that it diminishes either of us. I am happy for it all. I appreciate you and your thoughts, which I find enrich my own as they cause me to re-examine and consider.
On reflection I see you are correct that I might have been misconstruing your point. I apologies but sometimes my brain runs away from my intent.
Let’s just say I agree with your idea about striving for self-improvement, which is perhaps the point of intelligent life. I’m just a little fuzzy on what that means for other people so would not dare judge or be inclined to offer a proposal.
And (with no particular reference to your position) would like to add that it suits me fine that we all come in different shapes and sizes when it comes to the human mind, heart and soul and that one measure does not fit all.
Kindest regards,
-Quick
Hi Quick, thanks for the response.
EK will need a new thread soonish as I think we’re now completely off topic LOL.
I’m not entirely sure what I believe. Things seem increasingly malleable, yet (paradoxically) an odd unidentified inertia binds everything. My dream is that man wakes and creates a world worthy of moderate stasis.
I am troubled by the “modern” obsession with sophistication and so-called progress. We chase chains of prime numbers. We work 9-5 designing systems that can do tomorrows 9-5 for us. Tomorrow comes and we work 9-5 anyway, implementing a system that can design a system to implement a better system. Mediocrity becomes such a fine art that the skilled investment banker of yesterday wouldn’t be able to do the work of a pensions administrator today. A city man can live an entire lifetime without a single night under the stars around a camp fire. Without a single breath of crisp ocean breeze flowing off an unspoilt desolate shoreline. No conception beyond his pathetic juvenile artifices whatever.
Business gets bigger and more powerful, government gets bigger and more powerful. The massively wealthy get exponentially wealthier. The little man finances every penny, holds almost every vote, yet simply shrinks ever deeper into insignificance.
5pm to 9pm man sits on sofa staring at hypnosis marketing box. Weekends we try compose ourselves. Try remember where our happiness used to come from when we were young. Try remember where we wanted to go. Wars rage, children suffer, families disintegrate, the Lorenz curve collapses further. In the distance a billionaire looks at his creation and sees that it is good.
Cynical? Yes. Accurate? Probably not. But mean-man is certainly fast asleep and even outlier man seems trapped in the dreams of others long since dead.