17. Antidepressants: doors wide shut
Antidepressants have not been invented. They have been discovered. It happened through people taking drugs for another purpose. Some of these reported a diminishment in feelings of depression.
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As one says, the rest is history.
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Looking closer at it, the aim of that what has been discovered, is to indiscriminately diminish the suffering. How this is brought about, is not the topic of this text (although ‘evil tongues’ dare suggest that the effect is almost entirely through the placebo effect…).
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If I indiscriminately diminish my physical pain sensation, then I get quickly burned, get calluses here and there, get easily injured in all possible ways… I expect the same on the psychological domain.
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Let’s look at deeper mind (‘deeper self’) with the metaphor of a house. If it’s storming, I may be inclined to shut the doors of my house. However, the storm may be meaningful. Moreover, it may have become a storm precisely because I shut the doors when it was still a gentle breeze. Maybe the breeze/storm is just asking for attention?
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If I indiscriminately shut the doors with ‘medication’, I may feel better, but as a consequence I will also lose contact with the storm. I will not learn to cope with it. Therefore I will need to keep the doors shut even more and more. This is: I will become more and more dependent on the medication. After some bad experiences, even lifelong!
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This is not a plea to never shut any doors. It may be better to shut them when the storm could ‘blow your mind out’, so to speak. However, one should know what one is doing. There are many beautiful things outside, such as: the whole world. Even more: the universe.
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Antidepressants have not been invented. So researchers didn’t come to them through rational deduction. They just saw that some people ‘felt better’. In my metaphor, these people may have ‘closed the doors’. Until now, nobody knows what dire consequences an indiscriminate door-shutting can have.
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To me, a treatment that is focused on keeping the doors open as much as possible, seems much more humane. Antidepressants may be part of this, with caution. Mandatory is learning to cope with open doors and therefore with the ‘storm’. This may turn intoa gentle breeze again. Nothing as agreeable as that on a hot and sunny day.
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Mandatory is to get into communication with one’s deeper self, and to get every possible help in doing so.
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