S/NSRI: emotional lobotomy
Prozac: Why feel when you can just function? (Thanks Chemist!) Someone just forwarded me an article that 48% of American population is on antidepressants now. As Chemist suggested, the other 52% probably can't afford it. I would say that taking antidepressant for unhappiness is akin to dosing opioid for pain. The pain/happiness is still there, you just don't care. Is this how we want to live?
Sure, life has its ups and downs, rather than getting at the core of how we go about managing and dealing with stressors in our lives. We have turned our backs and started to numb ourselves, essentially ablating our emotion centers/circuitries. I'm sure many of these patients are depressed, is our policy of dispensing medications whenever they feel sadness the only solution? Emotions are not necessarily good or bad. Love and loss, for example, gives the contrast, the wide range of emotions that we need to experience in order to appreciate each other. By dampening our emotional response, what kind of world will we create?
The best classical works, from literature, music, paintings to sculptures, were created by those who went through those emotional ups and downs. Most if not all of those artists were manic depressives. Their ability to express their emotions, and to lead us through their emotional roller coaster would never exist today. Instead, we just get to nod our collective heads and go thru the same spastic dance moves to the drum beats of doldrums, that we call hip hops, pop country, and whatever else that P.Diddy decides we should listen.
The silver lining though, I suspect is that most people don't and won't know what feeling love is about... to go through the longing, obsessive phase, the insatiable emotional craving, and peaceful contentment. Without these emotional travails, people are much more easily deceived, can definitely caught up in the moment, wrapped up in the temporary emotional escape, and thus, pickup techniques will be so much more effective. Hence, the secret of connecting with women is through emotions, add on the time distortion of multiple venue changes, and in the whirlwind of kino escalation combined with our intrinsic desire for companion to enter into the dark night. Thank you Prozac, Celexa, Lexapro,... who needs roofies?!
2 comments:
Hey I'm all for opioids! They definitely helped me get through the past few weeks! Really though I'm in no position to tell whether I'll eventually fall prey to the culture of numbness that is quietly spreading across my country. Perhaps that numbness is a relief for a people bombarded by fear in the media, stress at work with substantially less vacation time than our European counterparts, and a generally too much inward focus, believing that we all were born to be rich princes and princesses and finding the truth about life to be something of a disappointment, so we hide to bury our shame at a life gone so wrong.
I really like this post, and I think it illuminates a point not often discussed. Many are in this PU stuff to avoid the 'rejection' so much so we become too on-edge. Love/hate, happy/sadness, you can't have one without the other. It's like the Taoist view of beauty, how can there be beauty with out something being ugly? One must embrace these contrasting, and seemingly conflicting (though I don't believe they have to be), and I suspect they'll become better at all this PU stuff.
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