Listening To Prozac Quotes

They have no idea what a bottomless pit of misery I am. They will have to do more and more and more...but they don’t know how enormous my need is. They don’t know how much I will demand from them before I can even think about getting better. They do not know that this is not some practice fire drill meant to prepare them for the real inferno, because the real thing is happening right now. All the bells say: too late. Its much too late and I’m sure that they are still not listening. They still don’t know that they need to do more and more and more, they need to try to get through to me until they haven’t slept or eaten or breathed fresh air for days, they need to try until they’ve died for me. They have to suffer as I have. And even after they’ve done that, there will still be more. They will have to rearrange the order of the cosmos, they will have to end the cold war...they will have to cure hunger in Ethiopia, and end the sex trade in Thailand and stop torture in Argentina. They will have to do more then they ever thought they could if they want me to stay alive. They have no idea how much energy and exasperation I am willing to suck out of them until I feel better. I will drain them and drown them until they know how little of me there is left even after I’ve taken everything they’ve got to give me because I hate them for not knowing.

Throughout the human life span there remains a constant two-way interaction between psychological states and the neurochemistry of the frontal lobes, a fact that many doctors do not pay enough attention to. One result is the overreliance on medications in the treatment of mental disorders. Modern psychiatry is doing too much listening to Prozac and not enough listening to human beings; people’s life histories should be given at least as much importance as the chemistry of their brains. The dominant tendency is to explain mental conditions by deficiencies of the brain’s chemical messengers, the neurotransmitters. As Daniel J. Siegel has sharply remarked, “We hear it said everywhere these days that the experience of human beings comes from their chemicals.” Depression, according to the simple biochemical model, is due to a lack of serotonin — and, it is said, so is excessive aggression. The answer is Prozac, which increases serotonin levels in the brain. Attention deficit is thought to be due in part to an undersupply of dopamine, one of the brain’s most important neurotransmitters, crucial to attention and to experiencing reward states. The answer is Ritalin. Just as Prozac elevates serotonin levels, Ritalin or other psychostimulants are thought to increase the availability of dopamine in the brain’s prefrontal areas. This is believed to increase motivation and attention by improving the functioning of areas in the prefrontal cortex. Although they carry some truth, such biochemical explanations of complex mental states are dangerous oversimplifications — as the neurologist Antonio Damasio cautions: "When it comes to explaining behavior and mind, it is not enough to mention neurochemistry... The problem is that it is not the absence or low amount of serotonin per se that “causes” certain manifestations. Serotonin is part of an exceedingly complicated mechanism which operates at the level of molecules, synapses, local circuits, and systems, and in which sociocultural factors, past and present, also intervene powerfully. The deficiencies and imbalances of brain chemicals are as much effect as cause. They are greatly influenced by emotional experiences. Some experiences deplete the supply of neurotransmitters; other experiences enhance them. In turn, the availability — or lack of availability — of brain chemicals can promote certain behaviors and emotional responses and inhibit others. Once more we see that the relationship between behavior and biology is not a one-way street.

The Everlasting Staircase" Jeffrey McDaniel When the call came, saying twenty-four hours to live, my first thought was: can't she postpone her exit from this planet for a week? I've got places to do, people to be. Then grief hit between the ribs, said disappear or reappear more fully. so I boarded a red eyeball and shot across America, hoping the nurses had enough quarters to keep the jukebox of Grandma's heart playing. She grew up poor in Appalachia. And while world war II functioned like Prozac for the Great Depression, she believed poverty was a double feature, that the comfort of her adult years was merely an intermission, that hunger would hobble back, hurl its prosthetic leg through her window, so she clipped, clipped, clipped -- became the Jacques Cousteau of the bargain bin, her wetsuit stuffed with coupons. And now --pupils fixed, chin dangling like the boots of a hanged man -- I press my ear to her lampshade-thin chest and listen to that little soldier march toward whatever plateau, or simply exhaust his arsenal of beats. I hate when people ask if she even knew I was there. The point is I knew, holding the one-sided conversation of her hand. Once I believed the heart was like a bar of soap -- the more you use it, the smaller it gets; care too much and it'll snap off in your grasp. But when Grandma's last breath waltzed from that room, my heart opened wide like a parachute, and I realized she didn't die. She simply found a silence she could call her own.

Prozac doesn’t do it unless we help it along. Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don’t believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it’s good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason.

A note about Prozac: I am absolutely all for taking Prozac if that is the choice a person makes. Even if a person is beset by the existential blues, if they choose to change the way they feel via medication, they have made a personal choice I fully respect. I know staunch Existentialists would disagree. They say that taking a pill that not only changes your mood, but changes your entire outlook on life, is an act of “bad faith.” This pill-taker is “unauthentic,” because he is treating himself as an object rather than as a subject. He is acting as if his world outlook is just another “thing” to be manipulated. Perhaps. But when I read the book Listening to Prozac by Dr. Peter Kramer, I was struck by how many pill-takers stated that once their depression lifted, they felt more like their “true selves” than ever before.

One result is the overreliance on medications in the treatment of mental disorders. Modern psychiatry is doing too much listening to Prozac and not enough listening to human beings; people’s life histories should be given at least as much importance as the chemistry of their brains.

Before studying imipramine, [Donald] Klein had worked with drug addicts, and he noticed that addicts had distinct preferences. Those who favored morphine could generally be distinguished from those who favored cocaine or amphetamine. And though both types of drugs give a rush of pleasure, the eventual effects are different. Opiates satiate an addict, at least while they remain effective. Cocaine and amphetamine do not satiate but, rather, excite further desire; stimulant addicts will tend to "go on a run" and rapidly use all the drug at their disposal. To Klein, these varieties of pharmacologic pleasure-seeking corresponded to varieties of ordinary enjoyment. Some pleasures, like eating a big meal or sexual orgasm, are satiating and do accord with Freud's concept of excitation reduction. But others, like "foraging, hunting, searching, and socializing," or sexual foreplay, are excitatory. Klein labeled these two sorts of pleasure "consummatory" and"appetitive.

In his work with depression, [Donald] Klein cried to distinguish chose patients who were best created with imipramine from chose best treated with MAOis (monoamine-oxidase inhibitors). Klein found that imipramine was most useful in the treatment of severe depressive episodes with a definite and rapid onset. Patients who looked less depressed, had arrived at depression more gradually, and complained mostly of boredom and apathy did not respond to imipramine but might respond to MAOis. This second group could sometimes be interrupted by distractions or amusements; in the midst of a hospitalization for depression, they might be seen on the ward chatting happily. Yes, they were impaired. But the impairment extended only to appetitive pleasures. Though they had lost the capacity to forage, if pleasure landed on their plate, they consumed it.

In his work with depression, [Donald] Klein tried to distinguish those patients who were best treated with imipramine from those best treated with MAOis (monoamine-oxidase inhibitors). Klein found that imipramine was most useful in the treatment of severe depressive episodes with a definite and rapid onset. Patients who looked less depressed, had arrived at depression more gradually, and complained mostly of boredom and apathy did not respond to imipramine but might respond to MAOis. This second group could sometimes be interrupted by distractions or amusements; in the midst of a hospitalization for depression, they might be seen on the ward chatting happily. Yes, they were impaired. But the impairment extended only to appetitive pleasures. Though they had lost the capacity to forage, if pleasure landed on their plate, they consumed it.

For unknown reasons, rare depressed patients even today will respond to no medicine except opiates, and a few researchers into depression have become newly interested in these substances. Fifty years ago, most patients who felt better on opium probably valued it for its ability to ameliorate scattered symptoms, such as sleeplessness, anxiety, and a general sense of malaise. Perhaps for mistaken reasons, Kuhn took the occasional success of opium to set the standard in the search for antidepressants. The hallmark of opium was that it restored energy in the depressed without being inherently energizing. Kuhn set our "to find a drug acting in some specific manner against melancholy that is better than opium"- that is, a nonstimulating antidepressant.