Why are we seeing "unhappiness" as pathological?

I see a trend and a development where we see unhappiness or discontent as something pathological, something to fight to eradicate and we use a high amount of anti-depressants in the process. Kids are being diagnosed with ADD and medicated all over the place. But are they really mentally ill? Or are they just the symptoms of a pathological society and development? So many of the masterpieces of history has come out of this natural unhappiness. Why isn't melancholy seen as the powerful gift it is any longer?

Freud talks about a natural state of unhappiness. Isn't this a much more realistic and true picture of the nature of Man? And wouldn't it be better to work for an understanding and acceptance of this picture? But I guess it isn't in the interest of development based on economical growth. Where you see the wastelands of the striving for a state of bliss and happiness everywhere. The endless search for gratification in material goods and so on.

The search for happiness is based in endless drives in human nature which can never be fully satisfied. We are taking away the great magnitude of human life with prozac in this search for happiness and destroying the world in the process. The imperative of happiness has become the real pathology, but we're so indulged in the pursuit of happiness and are being indoctrinated from birth almost to believe it's your right as a human being to feel happy.

Happiness can be so diverse, melancholy is a great form of happiness, poems, music and different pieces of art describing this natural part of human life are going to die away in this process. Life is so much more than happiness and that's what makes it so great, but we're so fixed in a race of an implanted idea of happiness that we're losing out on this tremendous diverse gift that life really is!

I think society has an underlying "understanding", or norm, that it is our responsability and duty to strive for happiness. Much because it gives us "happy" emotions, but also because unhappiness have a greater chance of rebelling. Throughout history melancholy and suffering has been looked upon as something beautiful. But i don't think melancholia is necessarily something productive. in many cases it simply leads to depression.

Given that happiness is something good, and something to strive for, I think the problem nowadays is that people think, subconsciously, that the way to achieve happiness is by material goods.

The think one have to ask first is: is happiness a universal goal?

I think society has an underlying "understanding", or norm, that it is our responsability and duty to strive for happiness. Much because it gives us "happy" emotions, but also because unhappiness have a greater chance of rebelling. Throughout history melancholy and suffering has been looked upon as something beautiful. But i don't think melancholia is necessarily something productive. in many cases it simply leads to depression.

Given that happiness is something good, and something to strive for, I think the problem nowadays is that people think, subconsciously, that the way to achieve happiness is by material goods.

The think one have to ask first is: is happiness a universal goal?

The word "happiness" doesn't really sit well with me, because it's become such a narrow term. In many ways it has become a product. A word synonym with feeling good, and if you don't feel good, something is wrong. And if that's the definition; we shouldn't make it a universal goal, because it's unattainable. And that's in my opinion what's exactly wrong, we're trying to reach an unattainable goal and that makes people more vulnerable to manipulation. Through their despair they are more open to be led by people claiming they have the answer to a blissful state of life. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we shouldn't try to make a society which doesn't cause unnecessary affliction, but there's going to be suffering to some degrees anyway. I think it's a part of human nature.

In "Civilization and Its Discontents", Freud talks about how we have to repress certain predispositions or instinctive drives in order to conform with society and that will inevitably result in some discontent. Our fault lies in trying to escape it or fill it with something else, because those instincts will always be there. One of the major points the way I see it is that society won't benefit from this awareness because of how it works, because things run smoothly as long as people are busy with their own fulfillment of desires.

The government gives you a totally unrealistic view of life by handing out anti-depressants and by telling people those natural parts of life are in fact unnatural you create a unhealthy circle where people will feel bad because they feel bad, so it'll just get worse. This view of life will just keep increasing depressions when you're told you're not suppose to feel bad. We should be able to embrace life's diversity and see the beauty of tragedies, sorrow, pain and so on. Instead of trying to escape it (which is hard since people make a lot of profit from this escapism). If you instead embrace life in such a, the way I see it, insightful manner, first then will humanity attain true progress and "happiness". The problem is that many people don't have any interest in a kind of progress like this.

[Scott]

It's certainly easy to imagine that the government, the economic powers that be and namely the for-profit pharmaceutical industry have an agenda to over-pathologize ailments. Consider restless leg syndrome. Consider the interesting points made by the documentary Orgasm Inc., which describes how pharmaceutical companies try to create sexual diseases -- and spread unnecessary feelings of inadequacy -- to sell and market drugs, even though ironically their drugs work less than porn at stimulating female users. The idea of over-pathologizing any of various forms of unhappiness and the corresponding alleged over-medication, such as with drugs like prozac, would fit right in with these other realized dangers of modern state capitalism and commercialism.

Of course, unhappiness is indeed very vague. It comes in many forms. For instance, married couples with children report lower happiness when asked on average than married couples without children. However, married couples with children get divorced less, which at least would have interesting implications if single, divorced people reported less happiness later in life than still-married couples. More to the point, I saw an interesting Ted talk in which a man whose name I forget hypothesized that while couples with children may indeed average out slightly lower in terms of reported happiness that this comes from having a more volatile happiness. In other words, couples with children experience a lot more ups and downs. So while the big ups when averaged against the big downs lead to a slightly lower average, perhaps childless couples never get to experience those big ups--those moments of unquantifiable bliss between dirty diapers and teenagers getting brought home by the police. In this way, we might think having children makes people happier in one way and less happy in another way. The point is simply an example of how vague happiness is.

Thus, I don't think we can say one way or the other that it is a mistake or detrimental to pathologize happiness or medicate to treat the would-be ailment. Rather, it depends on which kind of unhappiness which we wish to cure. Some slightly more specific ideas that the vague title of happiness may include are: ambition, temporary negative mood swings, brain disease such as a deteriorating hippocampus, grief over loss, shame/disappointment from addictive behavior (e.g. the psychological unhappiness an alcoholic or crackhead feels that makes him seek help), serious disappointment about things that are hard to change (e.g. see Martin Luther King).

It's natural for people to want to feel happy, but I agree that it seems like it has become harder for us to be comfortable with feeling sad sometimes, because now chronic sadness is looked at like a brain disease. I think you might be giving too much credit to prozac though.

We are taking away the great magnitude of human life with prozac in this search for happiness and destroying the world in the process.

Are you saying prozac is destroying the world? We hardly know anything about how SSRIs work or what they do. The vast majority of people who use prozac have the same response to placebos, it's only the few with the most severe depression that prozac works better than placebo. Your claim that prozac takes away the great magnitude of human life sounds just as unsupported as the psychiatrist who claims depression is a chemical imbalance that prozac can cure.

It is creepy to think about how we are trying to manipulate our brains to feel happier and happier. But when you look at how little we know about the brain, I don't think we are anywhere near having enough knowledge to actually do so. I don't think unhappiness is going anywhere too soon.

We hardly know anything about how SSRIs work or what they do.

And still we're prescribing this drug like it's M&Ms, that's no big secret. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/artic ... pills.html http://www.medindia.net/news/Survey-Rev ... 7379-1.htm

There are many powerful forces in play that have invested interest in giving an unhealthy view of life and how happy you're suppose to feel. Unhappiness aren't going anywhere as you say and that's my point, the kind of unhappiness we are experiencing are normal, and shouldn't be seen as pathological or something to fight off with drugs.

We have made an unrealistic view of how happy life should be. And instead of trying to actually change the causes of this unhappiness, people just go along because they think they have to. It's become habit, there's no way to change it, people seem to think. We're to small to challenge those powerful corporations, they're to big, we just have to go along. -There needs to be a mentality change. Nothing creates an economical growth like striving for something unattainable. There's a demand which will never be filled because it's within the human psyche. It doesn't take much insight to see how this "eternal striving for happiness-trend" has crystallized in to all the different sections in modern society. Happy pills, commercials, consumerism.. there are endless symptoms.

The market-development, the expanding alienating way of living, big city life where you have no direct invested affection in mass-societies creates a individualistic mentality and form of competition that only powerful CEO-s benefit from. But these questions are taboo, we're suppose to accept that this is "the good life", only terrorists question the liberal social-democracies. We have ultimate freedom, an illusion people suffer from and try to numb with ever growing prescriptions of SSRIs. A natural suffering which are in fact a valuable sign that something is fundamentally wrong with this so called "progress".

-- Updated May 29th, 2012, 3:13 pm to add the following --

Found a great article that express much of what I've been trying to get across: http://wellbeingfoundation.com/redherring.html

I have strong feeling that the reasons for this progress is due to a progress where human nature are being seen as a inconvenience in the wheel that makes the modern society go around. A increasingly mechanistically society where human "deficiencies" are a factor in the equation that makes an unpredictable outcome. Hence we try to make the factors in the equation into general rules, where there's no room for human spontaneity. A increasingly suppressive societies where the real individuality of humans are non-beneficial in an increasingly mutual co-operative or supplementary development. Make Man into predictable tools seems to be the goal here. For a society consisting of humans with natural human problems are a danger to the nature of how things are functioning. A depressed tool are a deficient tool, and SSRIs are a way to make people more predictable. Just as the way as society benefits from a human acting accordingly with "The Game Theory" makes a more predictable and contributory individual which is in benefit for the society as a whole.

When we turn humans into numbers, something essential with what being human is are lost in the process.

-- Updated May 29th, 2012, 3:15 pm to add the following --

Found a great article that express much of what I've been trying to get across: http://wellbeingfoundation.com/redherring.html

I have strong feeling that the reasons for this progress is due to a progress where human nature are being seen as a inconvenience in the wheel that makes the modern society go around. A increasingly mechanistically society where human "deficiencies" are a factor in the equation that makes an unpredictable outcome. Hence we try to make the factors in the equation into general rules, where there's no room for human spontaneity. A increasingly suppressive society where the real individuality of humans are non-beneficial in an increasingly mutual co-operative or supplementary development.

Make Man into predictable tools seems to be the goal here. For a society consisting of humans with natural human problems are a danger to the nature of how things are functioning. A depressed tool are a deficient and unreliable tool, and SSRIs are a way to make people more predictable. Just as the way as society benefits from a human acting accordingly with "The Game Theory" makes a more predictable and contributory individual which is in benefit for the society as a whole.

When we turn humans into numbers, something essential with what being human is are lost in the process.

-- Updated May 29th, 2012, 3:18 pm to add the following --

** Sorry, tried to edit some typos in the update, but you're not able to edit your updates.

It would not be a sorry state of affairs if there were not something wrong with its unhappiness. A sorry, unhappy or melancholy state of affairs or person needs correction by virtue of the complusion intrinsic to its correct assessmenmt in that respect. Therefore, it follows as night follows day, that such a state of affairs merely seems to be acceptable to one who actually fails to appreciate its melancholy. From this it subsequently follows as day follws night that Freud was so delusional he was unlicensed to practice in England.

When we turn humans into numbers, something essential with what being human is are lost in the process

Are we thinking that there are always inherent struggles emotionally with being human? That people have varying degrees of being able to process the reality of their shortfalls or successes - amongst general perceptions in western society i.e wealth, progress, love, friendships etc. - and that expectations for either are skewed causing greater anxiety and unhappiness? When someone is unhappy, are they feeling so because they aren't able to be somewhere they want to be, or have something they want to have that is out of their reach or never bothered to attain? It may seem that people will have wants or desires that they don't want to accept either; that their sense of morality would bark at them for attaining.

...Throughout history melancholy and suffering has been looked upon as something beautiful. ...

I'm not so sure that's true. Melancholy is the old word for what we call depression. Sure, with hindsight and plenty of post-facto investigation, lots of centuries-ago artists et al. have been "diagnosed" melancholy, but plenty of people were chased out to the heath to wander in their various states of distress back in those old days.

I suspect that in preceding decades, heavy, sometimes contemporaneous, doses of Christian ideology, natural rights, and freedom have given rise to some notion that happiness is a "norm"; and unhappiness is the "abnorm" and amenable, via industry-solicited and gov.-sanctioned forms, to treatment.

...The think one have to ask first is: is happiness a universal goal?

Maybe, but the very notion of a universal goal can easily produce "happiness" as a possible by-product.