I often wonder if I didn’t know that depression (among other things) runs in my family would I worry so much when I’m feeling down? I sometimes wonder how bad it is for your mental health to study psychology.
It would be nice to just have a headache, and feel drained and not worry about it.
Add comment May 31st, 2006
Did you know that alchohol is the only drug which causes agression?
That’s right. You name the terrible, awful drug you ‘ve been warned about and how bad it is for you…and the truth is: in a number of ways alchohol is arguably worse.
And that’s the one we’ve got as legal. …Makes lots of sense doesn’t it?
15 comments April 10th, 2006
I stumbled across one of the most interesting thing I’ve read on the statistics of drug-use and drug-abuse among adolescents in a long time (for those who don’t know me very well: keep in mind that this is an area of intense interest for me and I seek out information about it often).
“…it has been shown– and this is of vital importance, from the perspective of policy and prevention –that adolescents who never experiment with drugs (not even marajuana) tend to be as maladjusted as (although somewhat differantly from) actual drug abusers; that is, significantly more maladjusted than occasional users.”
I’m interested to hear comments on this…is it surprising/obvious/unbelievable?
6 comments April 9th, 2006
The mother, dissatisfied with her relationship with her husband turns for satisfaction to her son. Hateful of men in the world she quenches his male tendancies (exploration, courage, etc), guilting him into weakness–promising always to be there for him, with the dagger of an implication that he will never leave her.
…subconciously petrified of the power of his mother this man grows up intimidated by the gender in general and ends up mistreating any woman he comes into contact with. He grows up to be exactly the kind of husband to dissatisfy his wife and have her turn to her son. …
The tyranical father honours his daughter above all else. Sets up an excellent power struggle between the mother and daughter. The daughter grows up to do everything she can to try to impress her father, or make him happy, meaning that her entire world becomes like an inverted projection of his heirarchy of values.
…Father destroys daugther, mother destroys son, father challenges son, mother oppresses daughter.
My professors insight on Freud for the day?– “If you’re not offended by what Freud has to say, then you can be bloody well sure you don’t understand it”.
We’ll be watching a documentary on Robert Crumb over the next couple of days in my personality class. Should be frightening and disturbing and interesting. The gist we were given today is that he is the most well adjusted of the boys in his family. Oedipal complexes gone wild with unbridled intelligence is pretty damn scary.
4 comments February 6th, 2006
So I’m back at school, and beginning light therapy, and things are good. I’m almost ridiculously excited about my classes this term, which look a bit like this:
Personality and its Transformations
Bases of Cognition
Modes of Reasoning
and
The Phenomenon of Religion
*sigh*…life just doesn’t get any better than that.
I think, though, that it is definately the course on the theory of personality that I am most excited about. The professor seems like a really brilliant man, with a philosophy on teaching that I respect alot. He ‘invited’ us not to take notes in lecture and told us to treat the readings for the class like pleasure-reading, not to bother with highlighting or memorizing, because we’d never memorize it all anyway, and he wanted us to have a general understanding of what we were talking about that would stay with us rather than an ability to regurgitate facts that would get lost a week after the final.
The course is about how the personality develops throughout an individual’s life, and how that process has been transposed during differant times and cultures throughout human history. Pointing out that we haven’t changed much genetically over the last 150,000 years or so he likes to explore ideas about the human condition (stories, myths, etc) from people in as many differant eras as possible, believing that they were all dealing with the same personality development no matter what their technological awareness or scientific knowledge.
For example, on the first day he helped us explore the ancient Egyptian concept of Freud’s ego, super-ego and id. For those without much background in Freud, the idea goes that the ego (individual) is stuck trying to balance the id (basic and profane impulses from hunger and thirst to greed or sex) and the super-ego (the over-arching moral sense), and that life is a struggle as the ego attempts to hold the balance in place. In the case of Freud’s analysis we see a very individual and scientific (by which I mean observable, or at least defineable) division. The Egyptians had an idea which was much more abstract, but was equally brilliant, and perhaps more insightful (or helpful). They had three God’s which can be seen together. The first God is Osiris. Osiris is made of stone, but is old, crumbling and blind. The next is Isis. Isis is associated with the moon and the underworld. And the last is Horas, a falcon, with the single penetrating Egyptian eye. So how does this relate? Osiris represents society. He is solidly in place, but he is blind, and behind the times, and crumbling to pieces. Osiris is like the super-ego, the moral sense we’ve developed about what we’re ‘meant’ to do. Isis is like the id. She represents the underworld and the unconcious–the part of us which is most natural but most hidden from us. And Horas is the ego, stratifying the two. What makes this so brilliant, is the penetrating eye. To the Egyptians the question went like this: betrayed by society, and susceptible to the conditions of nature what is the individual to do? Pay attention! Keep your eyes open. And you will maintain a balance.
(…oh…and while on the various representations of this idea. Trinity anyone? Or in the Catholic tradition: Mary, God and Jesus anyone?)
The next story he told was one of a scorpion. We were talking about the human tendancy to flee from things they don’t understand. Novel people, places and things represent a potential threat to us–not just ideologically, but on a fundamental biological level. This is why the 3 year old is afraid of the monsters under his bed. He’s just old enough that his amygdala (responsible for core emotional responses, like love or fear) and his hippocampus (responsible for his map of the world) are starting to develop fully. He’s starting to get a sense of the world he understands as it is seperate from the world he doesn’t know anything about. When the light goes off, he doesn’t know anymore, that he understands the room he is in. He becomes scared, and in his fear he begins to associate everything he knows to be dangerous and bad with the dark places in his room. Monsters (usually reptilian, because of our innate fear of reptiles) MUST be under his bed! Eventually he grows out of this particular fear (hopefully) but the process of associating his greatest fears with the unknown is unlikely to ever leave him (….has anybody started thinking about the Western Capitalists tendancy to demonize Muslims yet? Or vice versa for that matter?). So anyway, this tendancy is very natural, and helps to protect us. But the unknown doesn’t just represent threat, it also represents the potential for reward, or the discovery of something new. So the healthy well-developed personality doesn’t just flee from novelty, it keeps its eyes open and cautiously explores it to see what benefits might be inside. This means stepping out of the world the individual understands, and may open the individual up to a completely new way of looking at the world (which can be scary) but if all goes well the individual will arrive at a new and better established understanding of the world than the one he began with. The story of the scorpion is the story of the individual who never tries this.
Imagine a large circle drawn on the ground. A scorpion, representing the human individual, is placed within this circle. He runs around inside of it, mapping it, and declaring it his home, and refuses to step outside. A division is made. The circle is seperated in half, and the scorpion traps himself on the one side. He scurries around within his newly defined border. Again the circle is divided in half. Again the scorpion scurries. Again it is divided. This process continues, each time driving the scorpion to scurry faster and faster, until finally he is trapped in a space so small he can’t move. So he stops. He lifts up his venomous stinger, and stabs himself in the back.
If we are unwilling to challenge our ideas of the world or broaden our perspectives over time they will get smaller and smaller and fold in on top of us. Eventually there will be nowhere to turn but onto ourselves. Unfortunately, however, if we’ve spent so long denying ourselves the process of exploration and learning, and refusing to open ourselves up to the worlds of others, when we turn into ourselves all we will find is hatred and fear and emptiness. And there will be nothing to do but die.
Frightening, and dark. But brilliant (sort of makes me think of Nietszche actually–who I’ve always been a fan of pretending to be able to psychoanalyze)–keep your eyes open. Explore the world carefully. It’s exciting. And if you keep moving outward, farther into it, you will become a stronger, wiser, more resiliant, more independant individual. But if you hide within the world you already know, you will become more and more hollow, right up until the end…
…that’s how the personality works…
1 comment January 13th, 2006
1. Steroid vs. exercise analogy
2. Perceptions of ‘normality’
3. Natural selection
In brief, to get everyone up to speed: I’m not O.K. I’m operating on about 6 productive hours a day (9:30am-3:00pm). Outside of those hours, if I can stay awake, I am almost completely incapable of focusing and if stressed in any way am likely to begin to cry. Given that it is exam season at the great and wonderful University of Toronto, this is not boding well.
So, my mom wants me on anti-depressants. I’m not actually frustrated at the suggestion (these days people are going on them for milder situations), I just refuse to do it. And there are 3 main reasons, which I will outline here.
I do this not as some kind of exhibitionist exercise but because these reasons are essential to my beliefs about the mistakes we humans are making in general and that is the kind of thing I wanted to use this blog to explore…
So with no further ado:
1. Steroid vs. Exercise Analogy
The first reason I don’t believe in anti-depressants has a lot to do with the reason I avoid drinking or doing drugs. I believe that our minds are very powerful things that we have not even begun to use to their full potential. Through martial arts, yoga, and meditation (or really any sport or practice pursued at a level reaching meditative states) people are able to fine-tune their mind in all sorts of incredibly powerful ways. I don’t think we need drugs to change the way our brains work (read: the way our brains work (as opposed to minds). As in I believe we can change the real-live grey matter. Our brains are much more plastic than we often realize. Case in point: London cabdrivers have significantly larger hippocampuses than regular people. Why? Because the hippocampus is responsible for temporal knowledge (i.e. location) and London cab drivers must pass a test on the entire layout of the metropolis before getting their license. While they practice, their hippocampus actually grows). I believe we can do that all on our own if we’re willing to pursue other paths (and I worry that consuming drugs in the meantime could hinder that potential).
I bring up the exercise analogy to outline why I would advocate more natural alteration than drugs. I’m sure everyone, without my going in to it, can see the distinction between an athlete who practices rigorously on a daily basis to achieve an optimum performance level and an athlete who uses steroids to achieve a similar effect (or even combines steroids with a rigorous routine, which is often the actual case). One involves learning about and using the natural physiological processes of the human body, and one is about ingesting external chemicals to alter said processes. I don’t like the idea of external chemicals.
Now when fleshing out this idea with my mother she pointed out that there was a very important difference. Mr. Steroid is trying to cheat to get ahead, while Mr. Anti-depressant is generally attempting to alter chemicals in pursuit of a ‘normal’ life. She was completely right. The analogy doesn’t hold true at that level. But that brings me to my second reason…
2. Perceptions of ‘Normality’ (particularly those of a ‘normal life’ in today’s Western societies)
What if our idea of ‘normal’ is all wrong? In fact, I’m quite sure that our idea of normal is all wrong. So why would I ingest chemicals (given my beliefs about drugs) to achieve a life that is currently regarded as normal?
This is where I think it is important that I stress that I have no ill will, or judgement for those who are on antidepressants. For example, my mother, who suffers from a very similar problem to mine (if not exactly the same as mine), went on antidepressants quite a few years ago. She was in her mid-thirties a single-mom not receiving child-support, working fulltime and holding two mortgages. …and she was an awesome mom. My brother and I were raced around South-Western Ontario involved in more extra-curricular activities than most kids could ever dream of. She wanted to be there for her kids, she had responsibilities she needed to take care of, and antidepressants allowing her to ‘lead a normal life’ were the only way she could achieve those tasks and be awake to experience her kids growing up. I have sooooo much respect for her and the things she accomplished during those years all by herself that I can’t even express it. Anyone with goals in the world today that really really matter to them that are being held back by anxiety or mood disorders: there are medications out there that make leading the life you want to live possible. Go for it.
My problem is this: my goal that really really matters to me is seeing us reassess the lives we live and turn to something more natural. I want to see us acknowledge our place as an animal on a suffering planet, wake up to environmental concerns and slip back in tune with nature. I want to see us acknowledge that our material economic concerns are causing us more stress than they are worth, and that we may feel like our lives are easier, but we are dying younger of heart attacks. I want us to slow down. What kind of hypocrite would I be if I went on drugs that went against my body’s natural process to speed myself up to operate in this system I disagree with so completely?
My doctor said maybe it’s about quality, rather than normality…but even still my point stands. My quality of life depends much more on my own peace of mind than on my accomplishments. I would not like to trade good exam marks for a deep feeling of hypocrisy.
I believe very strongly that we’re wrong about what is ‘normal’. …and in my life I want to see that changed. …and you have to be the change you want to see. (…this is the bullet I was talking about biting…that I’m not sure I’m ready for.)
3. Natural Selection
My last reason is slightly (but only very slightly) less idealistic than the first two. I do leave room, in my beliefs for the possibility that I’m pretty much wrong about humans. Maybe there is no God. Maybe there is no purpose to life at all. Maybe we’re not here to accomplish anything or to express anything. Maybe nothing at all hinges on the choices we make. It’s possible that we really are just freak happenstances of biology. But if that’s the case we still have to live. And we have to keep doing it even after we’ve all but destroyed the planet and our economies have collapsed (dark: ya. But I mean come on…look around). ….and in such a situation there would be no drugs. And then what? How would we possibly survive after becoming so dependant on medication?
If we really are just biology…then lets leave it to biology shall we? Let’s stop medicating for chronic diseases (physical or mental), because really it’s messing up natural selection pretty badly. My mom asked what I felt about anti-depressants in the case of someone who’s depressed to the point of being suicidal. My dark (but oddly idealistic) answer? Let them commit suicide*. Same reason I don’t believe in hospitalizing people with terminal illnesses. If we’re sick, to the point of death, let’s accept that, and die (..this sounds scary and dark and twisted because we are so afraid of death in the West today, but really: it’s part of life. It should not be scary). And let’s not stay alive (by virtue of medication) and then have more children, and pass on these defective genes. Because what’s gonna happen when we don’t have drugs anymore?
*Hugely important point: Unlike chronic physical illnesses, I believe that in the case of most mental illnesses a change in lifestyle would be enough to cure the person, or that a change in culture would cure a society of suicides; and I would obviously advocate either or both of those options over mass suicides. Normal people get sad because things aren’t right. It is true that there are cases of people who are chronically depressed, and appear to be sad even when things are O.K, but maybe that’s because they are involved in a lifestyle that is chronically not right. (i.e. maybe right now is my body saying: stop what you’re doing: …stop trying to work, while going to school full-time. you’re a 19-year-old female. That’s not what you were designed for(or maybe not. who knows?))
The image above is called “Pharm-Life” and is the work of Luke Chueh. His paintings, although disturbing are quite beautiful and often contain poignant social commentary.
5 comments December 7th, 2005
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