Subject: Re: Crucial Questions on Life: some sanity
Date: Sat, 03 Nov 2001 06:19:02 


Amazing post that clarifies what depression is outside of academic 
"productive" work towards tenure!

>From: Anthony White <anthony.white-AT-paradise.net.nz>
>Reply-To: bourdieu-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>To: bourdieu-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>Subject: Re: Crucial Questions on Life
>Date: Sat, 3 Nov 2001 12:41:07 +1300
>
>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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