Prescribe SSRIs to my Stereo
If you’ve been to a local venue or witnessed your music seen, chances are you have witnessed the sightly claim to independence by individuals conforming to nonconformist societies who feel they are unheard or misinterpreted or act as though there is nobody like them. Take emo for example. A subgenre of music stemming from hardcore, tapering into emotionally heavy music, morphing into cathartic over-dramatization. And where does this come from? A need to feel depressed? A longing for an avenue to express feelings? A way of creating a facade of personal deepness? In any case, emotion gets blown out of proportion, (when the EMOs get out of hand or even if they think they are acting normal) the more emotional than emotional: attention deficit, national deficit, nuclear deficit of the arms race, the infantile attitude of one upsmanship.
Any sub”genre” is hypocrisy against itself. To define by a word is to not explain it. Nothing exists as matter-of-fact if it is a classification. A social construct is all it is. A convenience at times, but equally misleading and distinct from the actual perceived entities they refer to, especially when extended as imperative to social survival imploding into essential survival.
It fuels a self-perpetuated emptiness on both ends of the stick…
The kids wanting the prescription drugs (SSRIs) to legitimize their “depression” diametrically resent the oppression or dependency the medicine may produce. Likewise, the drug companies are partly helping people but also trying to turn a profit. Shove the commercials in our face to ensure us we need medicine. It doesn’t matter if we are actually sick. We all need breast enhancement, perhaps in the future they’ll use surgically inserted benign tumors? We require pills to align ourselves to the status quo, attenuated minds tuned to the 12th root of 2 (like the ever popular equal-temperament musical scale). Go see your dentist about teeth strengthening injections. Talk to your doctor about psuedo-opium for your fear of dying. Sure there might be an ounce of concern for our well being, but the bottom line expects a profit. All in all in all is none. Leftovers of returns.
While doctors and patients feel the efficacy of treating depression through SSRIs is pretty good, treating non-existent disorders is even more powerful. Perhaps this is even more important to maintaining economic progress, as resources become exhausted, and we start closing in on the limit of the function. Most psychotherapeutic drugs act on a wide variety of receptor systems, inhibiting various receptor subtypes. For example quetiapine inhibits 5HT1a, 5HT2, D1, D2, a1, and a2. As the move from typical to atypical anti-psychotics was made, drugs are now trying to be designed to be even more specific. SSRI’s are called selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors because they selectively inhibit the re-uptake mechanism of serotonin. That is to say that the drug shows a higher affinity for blocking this mechanism and does not alter brain functioning in other ways (at least in theory). While this narrowing down of the action of the drug on the mind may teach us more about the serotonin system; and the brain, the cause of depression (if chemical) is bound to be more complex than a simple serotonin imbalance.
The narrowing down of the drugs action straight to a broadly encompassing depression is just as much of a stretch as the narrowing down of genres to isolate one’s identity. A similar selectivity happens in the emo sub”genre” as songs are often categorized crudely as happy, sad, or angry. Without taking the other emotions into consideration or allowing for paradoxical emotions such as melancholy euphoria. Beware of ordained prophylactics for hyper-diagnosed neuroticism and beware of taxonomy that divides a continuum which itself cannot be equated with its segregated parts. It fails on both ends, or non-ends; as fallacies of Division and Composition.
