File spoon-archives/bourdieu.archive/bourdieu_2001/bourdieu.0111, message 11


Subject: Re: Crucial Questions on Life
Date: Sat, 3 Nov 2001 12:41:07 +1300


This is a multi-part message in MIME format.


Alev,

[cross posting to Deleuze-Guattari list, as it could be interesting there ...]

Going even further off topic, but it seems necessary in order to think of these problems with clarity. 

Prozac, and other antidepressant medications, don't cause 'happiness'.  They create an absence  of depression.  Depression is not sadness, or grief, or sorrow.  Anti-depressants do not remove sadness or grief or sorrow. 

Depression stops one's ability to feel happiness, but it can also stop one's ability to feel sadness, or grief; one's mind still works -- you can think effectively -- but there is no desire to eat, no pleasure in sleep, no appreciation of comfort; you realise that something is probably funny, but can't bring yourself to laugh at it, or that something is sad, but can't bring yourself to be moved by it; there's no satisfaction in going to the gym, or running for an hour, or walking along the waterfront; no appetite for sex, and if you do it's purely mechanical; music's just some noise that comes from somewhere, friends are just objects that move through your space ...

Depression often feels just like being removed from your body, like you've stepped out the back door of your own head, and are watching it, but can't be touched by it, and don't really care what happens to it.  To get Deluezian for a moment, it's a complete absence of affect, an inability to experience affect.  It's really awful.  It's frightening just how much one doesn't care about one's self. 

Regards,
Anthony. 


  ----- Original Message -----
  From: AlevAdil01-AT-aol.com
  To: bourdieu-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
  Sent: Friday, November 02, 2001 12:27 AM
  Subject: Re: Crucial Questions on Life


  when i first read Berk's mesage I was bemused, not because mind/body/brain questions are frivolous but because I didn't se their relevance, to Bourdieu. However the liveliness of responses and the reactivation of the list meant that even if irrelevant to Bourdieu it invigorated   the list nevertheless. The comment on the irrelevance of the question in general that saw the mind/brain question as academic self induglence was mind boggling dumb as was the  idea that if we really cared about this then there might be world peace. You might find attempts to delineate experience and phenomena, the 'real' and identity, selfindulgent but   multinationals like Hoffman-LaRoche do not. Brain mapping   and delineating (whether there is) a difference between brain (organism) and mind (experience) is central to pharmaceutical profits and psychiatry - prozac any one? does serotonin=happiness? does unhappiness lead to a serotonin drop or is it caused by it? the future of cyberbrain modification etc is born also at the philosophy/technology interface.

  Alev

HTML VERSION:

Alev,
 
[cross posting to Deleuze-Guattari list, as it could be interesting there ...]
 
Going even further off topic, but it seems necessary in order to think of these problems with clarity. 
 
Prozac, and other antidepressant medications, don't cause 'happiness'.  They create an absence  of depression.  Depression is not sadness, or grief, or sorrow.  Anti-depressants do not remove sadness or grief or sorrow. 
 
Depression stops one's ability to feel happiness, but it can also stop one's ability to feel sadness, or grief; one's mind still works -- you can think effectively -- but there is no desire to eat, no pleasure in sleep, no appreciation of comfort; you realise that something is probably funny, but can't bring yourself to laugh at it, or that something is sad, but can't bring yourself to be moved by it; there's no satisfaction in going to the gym, or running for an hour, or walking along the waterfront; no appetite for sex, and if you do it's purely mechanical; music's just some noise that comes from somewhere, friends are just objects that move through your space ...
 
Depression often feels just like being removed from your body, like you've stepped out the back door of your own head, and are watching it, but can't be touched by it, and don't really care what happens to it.  To get Deluezian for a moment, it's a complete absence of affect, an inability to experience affect.  It's really awful.  It's frightening just how much one doesn't care about one's self.  
 
Regards,
Anthony. 
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: AlevAdil01-AT-aol.com
To: bourdieu-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Sent: Friday, November 02, 2001 12:27 AM
Subject: Re: Crucial Questions on Life

when i first read Berk's mesage I was bemused, not because mind/body/brain questions are frivolous but because I didn't se their relevance, to Bourdieu. However the liveliness of responses and the reactivation of the list meant that even if irrelevant to Bourdieu it invigorated   the list nevertheless. The comment on the irrelevance of the question in general that saw the mind/brain question as academic self induglence was mind boggling dumb as was the  idea that if we really cared about this then there might be world peace. You might find attempts to delineate experience and phenomena, the 'real' and identity, selfindulgent but   multinationals like Hoffman-LaRoche do not. Brain mapping   and delineating (whether there is) a difference between brain (organism) and mind (experience) is central to pharmaceutical profits and psychiatry - prozac any one? does serotonin=happiness? does unhappiness lead to a serotonin drop or is it caused by it? the future of cyberbrain modification etc is born also at the philosophy/technology interface.

Alev
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