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Dr. Bob is Robert Hsiung, MD,
bob@dr-bob.orgShown: posts 1 to 4 of 4. This is the beginning of the thread.
Posted by kid_A on September 6, 2001, at 13:03:18
Indulge me if you will... Ive been thinking a lot about happiness and sadness and what we consider 'normal' and what we consider pathologies be they what they may, manic depressives, post partum, chronic depression, etc etc...All of us have made attempts at repairing our sadness through some means or another, we sense there is something wrong and we set about to fix it, sometimes sucessfully sometimes not...
I know that I have always felt awkward in my sadness, I couldnt shake it and I didnt know anyone else who really felt the same... I knew why I was sad mostly, but still I didnt think that I could rid myself of it...
Since I've started medication and talk-therapy my life has turned around considerably and Im doing the things that I want to do in my life... Ill have some bad spells when I forget to take my medication (oddly the antipsychotics seem to affect my moods the greatest, and when I skip them for a few days I start to ruminate...)... but by and large my emotions though not in the clouds have flatened out, and believe me, apathy is much better than despair...
Its then that I started to think about everyone else... Lets say that the basis of the mechanims for hapiness or at least stasis exist in these specfic chemicals and receptors that our drugs target. Now to be a succesfull species it would help us as advanced organims if we were not mired in sadness... Through natural selection we have developed chemicals in our bodies that help regulate our emotions so that if some other caveman clubs the cavegirl you had your eye on, the more successfully adaptable of us will not just brood in our cave until we starve...
Now, lets make things clear, we -still- lost the cavegirl, we lost our mothers to sickness, or any other number of impulses that may contribute to some form of sadness, but the adaptable caveman grieves and then moves on, the unadaptable caveman, with malfunctioning receptors can not move on, and dies out...
Now as modern day cavemen and cavewomen, we all have stressors that act upon our lives and perhaps these are known to us, or perhaps they are unknown and our sadness comes from a place that is nameless even to ourselves... By taking the drugs we take we are litterally whitewashing over the emotions we got stuck in... perhaps we are going overboard, perhaps we are jamming the receptors too much as anyone who has experienced apathy and anhedonia can attest to... So you might say in a way, we are taking apathy pills (lets call them that instead of happy pills, since truly its not that easy)... Its not as simple as getting 'better', we are just pushing ourselves chemically into an area of hyper apathy, so that perhaps when we look in the mirror, its still the same old ugly face staring back at us, perhaps its still the drunk or the jobless, perhaps all our loss is still true, our loss is still real and meaningfull, but in our new chemical state we stare past that face and into the white of no emotion.
Any thoughts?
Posted by susan C on September 6, 2001, at 14:05:12
In reply to And how do we know when we are truly happy?, posted by kid_A on September 6, 2001, at 13:03:18
Hi Kid
No emotion? I agree with your comment about apathy is much better than despair...However, I would hope as I gain some mental clarity that it is my resiliancy that returns. That emotions are there, that I can get happy, angry, sad, go through loss and discover and be depressed as well and move through them. Resiliance is my favorite word right now. Like silly putty, like a squeeze from a hug, like the crust of fresh baked bread.
Off to the grain silo, yours sincerely,
Farmer Mouse
Susan C> Indulge me if you will... Ive been thinking a lot about happiness and sadness and what we consider 'normal' and what we consider pathologies be they what they may, manic depressives, post partum, chronic depression, etc etc...
>
> All of us have made attempts at repairing our sadness through some means or another, we sense there is something wrong and we set about to fix it, sometimes sucessfully sometimes not...
>
> I know that I have always felt awkward in my sadness, I couldnt shake it and I didnt know anyone else who really felt the same... I knew why I was sad mostly, but still I didnt think that I could rid myself of it...
>
> Since I've started medication and talk-therapy my life has turned around considerably and Im doing the things that I want to do in my life... Ill have some bad spells when I forget to take my medication (oddly the antipsychotics seem to affect my moods the greatest, and when I skip them for a few days I start to ruminate...)... but by and large my emotions though not in the clouds have flatened out, and believe me, apathy is much better than despair...
>
> Its then that I started to think about everyone else... Lets say that the basis of the mechanims for hapiness or at least stasis exist in these specfic chemicals and receptors that our drugs target. Now to be a succesfull species it would help us as advanced organims if we were not mired in sadness... Through natural selection we have developed chemicals in our bodies that help regulate our emotions so that if some other caveman clubs the cavegirl you had your eye on, the more successfully adaptable of us will not just brood in our cave until we starve...
>
> Now, lets make things clear, we -still- lost the cavegirl, we lost our mothers to sickness, or any other number of impulses that may contribute to some form of sadness, but the adaptable caveman grieves and then moves on, the unadaptable caveman, with malfunctioning receptors can not move on, and dies out...
>
> Now as modern day cavemen and cavewomen, we all have stressors that act upon our lives and perhaps these are known to us, or perhaps they are unknown and our sadness comes from a place that is nameless even to ourselves... By taking the drugs we take we are litterally whitewashing over the emotions we got stuck in... perhaps we are going overboard, perhaps we are jamming the receptors too much as anyone who has experienced apathy and anhedonia can attest to... So you might say in a way, we are taking apathy pills (lets call them that instead of happy pills, since truly its not that easy)... Its not as simple as getting 'better', we are just pushing ourselves chemically into an area of hyper apathy, so that perhaps when we look in the mirror, its still the same old ugly face staring back at us, perhaps its still the drunk or the jobless, perhaps all our loss is still true, our loss is still real and meaningfull, but in our new chemical state we stare past that face and into the white of no emotion.
>
> Any thoughts?
Posted by akc on September 6, 2001, at 14:16:36
In reply to And how do we know when we are truly happy?, posted by kid_A on September 6, 2001, at 13:03:18
>
> Indulge me if you will...I will . . .
With all that has been going on with my mother, and with my very unexpected reaction, I have been giving a lot of thought to emotions myself. I did not grieve over my dad, or his mother. My grandmother was the one person I said for years was the only person who ever loved me. I always wondered what was wrong with me.
Last night I was watching Star Trek Voyager. Ensign Kim fell in love with an alien he had to leave behind. Chemically he literally bonded with her. He refused medical treatment -- and instead very much grieves. Seven of Nine as she continues to grow in her humanity (this is in her first season) is trying to understand Kim's decision to feel instead of taking the medication.
How much of what has happened with me these past few years has been a refusal to feel? Maybe some of what I have been trying to medicate has been normal, everyday life feelings. Now definitely there are times that I have been clinically ill and definitely in need of treatment. But a lot of what you have shared -- it hits home.
I think as a society we do try so hard to avoid our feelings. If we aren't going to the doctor for our happy pill, we are getting it in a bottle or on the street. Maybe we aren't suppose to be happy that often. Maybe we are suppose to feel pain and other icky feelings.
My therapist asked me yesterday how my grieving was going. Now my mom is still very much alive. She could be here for some time -- we have no way of knowing -- it could be tomorrow -- it could be 2 years from now. That is just the nature of her condition. But the fact is my t is right -- I am experiencing grief right now -- something I have never really done before. It's leeking out in all sorts of ways and in all sorts of places. The important thing is that I am feeling. I am not medicating in any way. I'm "truly" feeling. Hopefully, in the same way, I'll know happiness when it comes.
akc
Posted by Greg A. on September 6, 2001, at 17:59:11
In reply to Re: And how do we know when we are truly happy?, posted by akc on September 6, 2001, at 14:16:36
How do we know when we are truly happy?
Thanks for asking. That got me thinking. If we were truly happy we wouldn’t be pondering the question. We would just be. Living in the moment. Not dragging a past around with us or dreading our future. We would experience whatever came our way and emotions would just spring up naturally and then move on. Like your grieving caveman.
I used to wonder if the drugs robbed me of my emotions, but now I think I did that to myself. I don’t know if the drugs overload the brain receptors and block real emotions. Maybe the ‘emotions’ that come with anxiety and depression, or mania, or whatever – maybe they have messed up all the receptors and those nice neurotransmitters. With drugs, we are still tinkering blindly trying to make repairs. We never received a set of instructions in a language we could understand. Maybe that’s why we get so much partial or temporary success. Just when we think we’re on to something, we can’t find the next step in the directions.
I am convinced that the years I spent training myself and being tutored to show no ‘inappropriate’ emotions – like anger or grief – have got me where I am today. I will always be a recovering depressed person. Capable of a return to that cloudy, sad gloom at any time. (Lest you think I am too pessimistic – I, as a recovering case know how to shorten those gloomy stays and how to make them more tolerable) After bottling up emotions for years, being strong and fooling everyone but myself, I was rewarded with reasonable substitutes – anxiety and depression. Of course these are even more hideous and reprehensible than regular emotions so I spent another few years trying to cover these up as well. It got to be too much. I said the hell with it. I am weak. I am sick. I need help. I am not perfect. I will never be perfect. I don’t want to be perfect. . . and these are good things. I still don’t know how to be happy, or sad, or angry in what I imagine to be a normal way. I have a much better idea of where to look for happiness than I did before though. I know that sadness and anger are not to be avoided, but are necessary human responses. I’m just not used to them and I don’t know how they work yet.
This is the end of the thread.
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