Article re: treatment of depression

[pegkerr]

Happiness: Enough Already
The push for ever-greater well-being is facing a backlash, fueled by research on the value of sadness.

I am trying to figure out why this article upsets me so much. I guess because several members of my family (including me) are on medication for mood disorders. I read this as insinuating that perhaps we are just a little too eager to forego a truly authentic life in exchange for a surcease of the pain of depression. Well, actually, the article is talking about the pain of sadness, which it seems to conflate with depression.

Am I over-reacting? Your reactions?

Comments

[tesla-aldrich.livejournal.com]

Random thoughts:

One of the things the author is speaking of is an age-old dichotomy: shall I be content or shall I be ambitious? I think many of us have a tendency to slip so far in one of those directions that we forget to use the other one even when it would serve us better. (Like my ex-boyfriend who kept accepting worse and worse deals from employers, even though he could have done something about it, because he was able to adjust to almost anything and still be content.)

I do have a problem with determining the "value" of happiness based on criteria such as earnings or education, mostly because I view long-term happiness as one of life's central goals, which earnings and education merely serve to support.

By and large I agree with the premise that we as a society have come to a point where we believe that any measure of unhappiness (no matter how fleeting or how justified) is bad and should be eradicated posthaste. As someone who has suffered from depression, here's what I know about myself: If I am tempted to describe myself as "feeling unhappy", then by definition I'm not dealing with depression, but something much milder that I'll get over (although I may have to work at it). When it's depression I'm hopeless and immovable. From in here it's obviously an entirely different creature.

I would never consider medicating unhappiness; I would definitely consider medicating depression.

I think one danger lies in that our medical system has gotten so good at medicating depression (and so many people stand to make money from doing so) that they are now marketing the image that no-one ever has to be unhappy again. They aren't distinguishing between a normal range of human feelings - feelings that make us human - and a crippling condition.

Wow, sorry to be so long-winded. Thank you for the interesting link.

[nmsunbear.livejournal.com]

I do have a problem with determining the "value" of happiness based on criteria such as earnings or education

Exactly -- I was amazed that anyone would suggest that being too happy is bad because if you were less happy you might be impelled to make more money! (And where's the consideration of the flip side, that perhaps money, or the process of getting it, eventually causes more problems than it solves?) The only part of that argument that made sense to me was the political participation part, which incidentally is the one they didn't bother claiming to have evidence for.