Pro Prozac

I realize that I might have given the impression in the last blog that I am against antidepressant drugs, and nothing could be further from the truth. No one should have to suffer an instant from clinical depression--the chronic, immoveable depression that has no immediate and identifiable cause--and I just wish people who do so suffer could be matched more quickly and more efficaciously with those drugs that might work for them.

Of course, then my mind wanders to analogies. My old friend George Orwell used to rant not only about how the beer in England was worse than in his youth, but that England had become a nation of aspirin chewers. He thought--I speculate, for he never clearly spells it out--that a headache or muscle ache should be suffered through, or perhaps that people were taking aspiring too frequently. (This from a man who was shot through the neck during the Spanish Civil War and did not refuse injections of experimental sulfa drugs as he was dying of tuberculosis.) But if all physical pain is bad--beyond that which tells us something is wrong with our bodies--then why not all psychic or emotional pain, whatever its source--depression, or the death of a loved one?

I was going to tie this up with Plato's banishment of artists in Book X of The Republic--which to me is more invidious than any of my philosophy profs ever let on: it's not just that they are liars--but I need a better translation--and at this moment, probably a better mind.