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| -Short Attention Span Theater- |
| Antidepressants, Empathy, and Democracy |
| 2022-09-24 |
| [City Journal] You can learn much about what a civilization lacks by observing what sentiments it elevates as an ideal. The ancient Greeks, who invented the concept of the "golden mean" between extremes, were, on the basis of Greek tragedy and historical accounts, given to wild eruptions of rage. For years now, Americans have exalted empathy as our king of sentiments, but on the evidence of everyday life, empathy is in short supply. We’re surrounded by polls, studies, memes, and viral events said to reveal or shape our national existence. It could be, though, that the social forces that most determine our collective destiny are barely talked about because they are impossible to quantify. To take one profoundly consequential trend: nearly one in four American adults is taking psychiatric medication, and a substantial portion of these people report experiencing "emotional blunting"—an inability to feel their own and other people’s emotions. Over the last few years, I lost two close friends to the effects of psychiatric medication. Both had been taking antidepressants for many years. One was on Trazodone, which, along with stunting empathy, causes reckless behavior and problems with impulse control. I watched as he blew up his marriage and in one instance publicly humiliated his wife and teenaged children. I’ll never forget the strange, dislocated grin he wore the last time I saw him. He had come with his children for lunch and began showing my wife and me pictures of his third child, whom he had just had with his new wife, as the two children he had raised with his first wife stood there, stricken and speechless. And yet he grinned as if we were all having the time of our lives. I had been very fond of him, but the second friend, whom I knew for 20 years, I had loved. He was a kind, deep-feeling, brilliant, funny, creative prince of a man. But he began to act irrationally, missing basic emotional cues, finally emotionally hurting my son, whom my wife and I had, out of trustfulness, allowed him to sponsor in some way. I gently asked him to be a little more conscientious with our son and he said that he would—then gave me that same dislocated, jack-o’-lantern grin I had seen from my other friend. When he never did change his heedless behavior toward our son and I reproached him in an email, he exploded and tried to retaliate against me professionally. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #4 The final paragraph addresses your concern, Rob: If it is true that the essence of a functioning democracy is the ability of its people to feel empathy for one another, then the widespread reliance on antidepressants—and I lament not their necessary use, but their unnecessary overuse—is like some cruel joke. Add to the pharmacological cultivation of emotional blunting the emotionally blunting effect of lives lived increasingly online, and you have a democracy resting on a fundamentally anti-democratic way of life. The Cassandras who see democracy about to collapse at every turn might want to look in their own medicine cabinets. So an internal effect that matches the external effect of botox in creating a separation between the self and its emotional response to the outside world. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2022-09-24 15:20 |
| #3 Scientologist propaganda garbage. Trazadone wasn't their problem. Trazadone was an attempt to help them deal with their problems. |
| Posted by: Rob Crawford 2022-09-24 10:38 |
| #2 #1 You're right, never ignore the obvious. But the observation about the peculiar, out of place smile is sadly familiar to me at least. These drugs are significantly over-prescribed with almost no thought to the consequences. We all have our share of curve balls and heartbreak, medication shouldn't be the default first resort, at some point you really DO need to just get over it. |
| Posted by: Cesare 2022-09-24 10:22 |
| #1 I cannot make any significant connection between the behavior of my two old friends and what I knew to be their characters. Let me make the "connection" for you. "Birds of a feather, flock together." Have another look at your holiday greeting card list. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2022-09-24 02:34 |