Settling for Happiness

For most of my life, I was fairly certain that the worst thing that could happen to me was an average life. Settling. I would think about working an average job (even one that I enjoyed) and coming home to a normal house and it all sounded like stagnation. It was the worst thing I could imagine. Most millennials have been told that they could be the best, which often translates into the implication that you should be the best. For me, this was the conviction that unless there was something in this world that I accomplished that no one else could, I was not doing enough.

Perfectionism is a nasty curse. There is always more that you could be doing. If you’re dedicating your life to writing, you’re losing out on your ability to make music or research neuroscience or learn languages. Possibility is always a kind of pressure. One of the biggest problems of defining yourself by your achievements is that there are always more things to be achieved. You might reach one of your goals, but there are five more that you could complete today alone. “Average” tends to be defined by goals and accomplishments. You know someone is outstanding when you can point to their resume of accomplishments. Or so we’re taught to believe.

The problem with this model is that I know dozens of people who have done amazing things in their lives. All of them have found different ways to excel, and dedicated themselves to whatever their passion is. I hear news stories almost daily about people accomplishing things I could never hope to achieve. There’s no way to live up to all of these possibilities. What I don’t hear is stories of contentment. There are very few people in my life who seem to simply exist in the space that they’re in without any energy pushing them somewhere else, any driving need to be doing more or appearing better.

Contentment is not a competition. If all your friends are content with their lives, you don’t have to be more content in order to feel ok. In contrast, achievement and perfection are values that compare: the more your friends achieve, the more you have to achieve if you want your achievements to stand out.

So here’s a new goal: settling for happiness. Are you content with your job? Do you have a place to live and a regular income? Do you have people that you love? Do you get to see those people on a regular basis? Awesome. Settle for that. Relish it.

A few nights ago I got to see my friends for the first time in over a month. We didn’t do much. Ate some cookies, played Mario Kart, and just goofed around with each other. I laughed a lot. I smiled. I got hugged and teased and affirmed. It was hardly a mind-blowing experience, except that there was no anxiety, no worry, no desire to be anywhere but where I was.

Yesterday I went to the Renaissance Festival with some new friends and felt nothing but affection and excitement for who I was with. I was a little tired and didn’t have the money to spend on all the exciting things I saw, but again, there was no question in my mind that this was where I wanted to be and these were the people that I wanted to be with.

Tomorrow I’m starting a new job and I’m a little anxious, but I get to hang out with one of my best friends afterwards, and I know that no matter what happens or whether the job is a good fit or not, I get at least a few hours tomorrow of pure contentment. That’s more than some people can say in months. That’s amazing.

I’m not saving the world. I’m not making tons of money. I’m not living in the nicest house or recognized around the world as a world changing genius. But I like who I am and I like who I’m with. I will settle for that any day over saving the world, because I have saved my world. Somewhere along the way I hope to improve the lives of some people around me, but the best way to do that is by being happy and doing things I like to do. So I’m going to settle. I don’t necessarily need a high powered career or a book deal. I don’t necessarily need an excess of disposable income. I suppose if that’s settling, then I’m all for it, because I’d rather be happy than amazing.

A Little Bit of Fun

I spend a lot of my time writing about Important Things. I care a lot about social justice and mental health and trying to make the world better. I’m all idealistic and such. Today, I think I can make the world better by doing something a bit different: by giving you all something a little bit fun. The last two days I’ve been focusing on goofiness. I added “laugh” to my to do list. I’ve been searching for silly videos, reading ridiculous things on Buzzfeed, and generally refusing to feel any sort of guilt about taking care of myself (or at least trying).

In that spirit, I want to provide you all with some joy for the weekend. Here’s what’s been making me smile.

http://www.tickld.com/x/i-wish-this-man-was-my-father-hes-hilarious

http://news.distractify.com/fun/animals-fun/cats-sleeping-in-really-awkward-positions/?v=1

Happiness Pills: Yay or Nay?

Over the weekend I was hanging out listening to one of my old professors play music (because that’s how I roll). He introduced one of his songs with the question “if I could get happiness with a pill, would I do it?” Instantly my “grrrr, mental illness stigma” detectors went off, but I have great respect for this particular individual and challenged myself to think a bit further about it. I realized that in general, the question “if I could be happy with a pill” is a. unclear and b. misleading, as well as c. totally unrelated to the antidepressants that actually exist today.

The biggest problem I have with the question is what we mean by “happy”. Is it the actual presence of a positive emotion? Or is it simply a lack of negative emotion? Does it mean you can’t feel negative emotions, even when they’re appropriate? I suspect that when this question is posed most people mean feeling on the positive side of the emotion spectrum constantly. While this might sound appealing to lots of people, I think there are actually some serious problems with this concept, and that even the idea of a pill that can do this is self-contradictory.

Emotions have appropriate times and places. They come as reactions when they’re functioning healthily. They fit situations or they don’t. If you aren’t happy and you take a pill to be happy, your emotions probably don’t make any sense for the situation that’s happening around you. It seems a bit like taking away physical pain: you no longer have a barometer for when something is wrong or hurting you. You no longer have the emotions that tell you something has violated your boundaries or treated you inappropriately. Just as with a lack of physical pain, this will probably result in doing things that are actually hurting you without realizing it.

Negative emotions give us information. They make us more aware of what’s happening around us because they clearly communicate to us “something bad is happening”. Fear tells us to escape, anger tells us that a boundary has been violated, sadness and grief tell us that we’ve lost something we care about. This makes them appropriate.

We all understood why Ten was crying, and it would have been creepy if he wasn’t.

Oftentimes this awareness does more than simply tell an individual about situations that are harmful to them. We have empathy, so our negative emotions often inform us about things that are morally inappropriate and then give us an impetus to act. If I didn’t have anger or sadness, I think I would be hard pressed to care about something like anti-gay hate crimes, or oppression of women. I could come to an intellectual conclusion about why those things were wrong, but without any feelings of sadness it doesn’t have the same impact. Without our emotions we are less aware of the world around us, particularly the things that need to be improved.

I’m less worried about the concept of an identity or an essential self that many people find themselves wondering about when they think of pharmaceuticals. Every time we make choices we affect our brains and through our brains our emotions, thoughts, and selves. When we try to change a habit, when we go somewhere new for the first time, when we learn a new fact or skill, we are training our brains to operate differently. Therapy is all about changing the patterns that your brain uses and finding more effective ones. Perhaps there is some core that holds steady through all of that, but every human being in the world encounters so much change and adjustment to their personality, from within and without, that it seems a bit silly to be worried about losing yourself, especially if what you’re changing will improve things.

But that’s the question here: will being constantly happy improve your life and the world?

Will this make me a better, healthier, more functional person who is more capable of improving the world around me and contributing something? I don’t think depression or sadness are necessary to be productive or creative or any of those other silly myths that depression tells, but I do think having the full spectrum of human emotion is deeply important for having empathy, for understanding why certain things are morally inappropriate and others are morally praiseworthy, and for gaining motivations to make changes.

There are some ways in which always being positive will improve the world around you (for example you’ll probably be a much nicer person to be around), but as I mentioned above, it also makes you less aware of what’s wrong with the world, and in the end I think the balance would point towards no, it would not improve the world unless everyone in the world were fed happy pills at the same time so that we didn’t need to empathize with people who were in pain. As long as there are injustices and other unhappy people in the world, it’s important for our understanding of those people to be able to empathize and feel anger or sadness on their behalf. But what about improving your life?

I have a hard time imagining how a pill that consistently makes you happy would actually do anything to improve your life, because as I mentioned before, negative emotions tell us when a situation is bad for us. If we don’t have that information, we’re likely to stay in situations that will hurt us. Additionally, we’re less likely to develop healthy coping strategies. Pain gives us a reason to find a better way of doing things. This is why antidepressants are almost always accompanied by talk therapy so that the patient can find effective ways of managing their lives and emotions.

As an example, let’s say you were in a relationship where your significant other was emotionally abusive. They berated you constantly, expected you to do all the work, and never did anything for you. But despite all that you were constantly feeling just fine. It seems unlikely to me that you would be willing to work towards better relationship strategies, leave the relationship, or confront your partner about their inappropriate behavior if it never made you feel sad or unhappy. You would never learn that the things they said were inappropriate because they didn’t hurt you. You would never spend time trying to understand why they did what they did because it never had any impact on you.

What about appropriate emotions? How would we feel grief for things ending if we took a pill that made us always happy? Doesn’t it seem deeply wrong to not grieve things, unhealthy even? I suspect that not grieving (which leads to not processing and not effectively storing those memories and relationship in a way that you can cope with them and they’re not consistently popping into your mind) would make it harder and harder to be happy and we’d have to increase our happy pill dose again and again and again.

Unless happy pills came with effective coping techniques, appropriately living on conjunction with your values, healthy relationships, and other positive ways of living, they would stop working. And if everything feels ok all the time, why would you have any motivation to do all these other things? Most often the ways we understand what our values are is by feeling guilt or shame when we violate them. If you don’t have these emotions, it would be nearly impossible to live in tune with your values. People who don’t have these emotions get labeled sociopaths and psychopaths. We understand there’s something wrong with that.

The problem is that if you were made this way by a pill, you wouldn’t set up your life in such a way to create happiness, which means that you would keep yourself in bad situations, living antithetically to your values, in shitty relationships. And so the happy pills would have to do more and more work. And then you’d have to up the dosage, and you’d make your life even worse. And then the pills would have to do more so you’d have to up the dose…

We actually already do have these hypothetical happy pills that cut us off from appropriate emotions and make us feel good. They’re called drugs and most people agree that they’re a bad way of dealing with your emotions. They don’t provide a stable foundation for happiness and good living, because they mean if you stop taking them your happiness can flit away. They mean that you lose the fear of being homeless or starving because you’re stuck in the happy of this exact moment. They are deeply unhelpful.

The other thing I’d worry about is whether this stunted way of feeling would leave me with less happiness overall. Would you still get those melancholy/bittersweet moments that are so flipping good because of the fact that they hurt? Would I still get to watch Romeo and Juliet and love it? Would I still understand culture and relationships and other people? Would I turn into an annoying asshole because I never have to work on myself? What about the high of coming up from a bad day? The adrenaline of fear and anxiety heightens everything…what do we do without that?

If I could find a pill that made me content (which is what an antidepressant is supposed to help with: give you the emotional space to be able to tolerate things and find some contentment), that I would take. I would take the possibility of reacting accurately and effectively to the stimuli that surround me, of being able to reach my goals without my emotions getting in my way. What I wouldn’t take is a pill that disturbs the relationship between stimulus and appropriate response. Many people get these two things mixed up, and so when this question comes up in the context of antidepressants, I think it’s important that we remember to distinguish.

Sure it might be nice to feel good no matter what you’re doing, but what’s the point? It’s easy to be oblivious. It’s hard to be aware and truly work on yourself and your world.

 

Medicalizing Difference: A Study in Oppressive Language

I was perusing the asexual blogosphere the other day and ran across this fairly disturbing post that looked at an abnormal psych paper. This paper was proposing a potential new diagnosis to be added to the DSM, which they term “Nonsexual Personality Disorder”. While this is the first I’ve heard of someone literally terming asexuality as a disease, it is not uncommon for people to medicalize it or treat it as something which needs to be fixed.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time with DSM definitions and looked at a lot of problems with the ways we currently define mental illness, but even one glance at what this person proposes as the definition of Nonsexual Personality Disorder tells me that this is a horrible definition for many reasons. At its root, it says that this is different from normal and thus it’s bad without actually taking into consideration whether or not the difference is harmful to anyone. This is the same thing that happens to people who are gay, people who are extremely sexual or kinky, or all sorts of things that constitute “different”, generally from the privileged and well off majority.

Looking closely at the definition, we can pull apart what’s wrong with it and see how medical language is often used to oppress difference. This particular case is a doozy as it manages to pack in all kinds of oppressive tendencies that happen to many different people, so this should be fun.

Let’s start at the beginning shall we?

“A.  A marked inability to experience sexual attraction, beginning in early adulthood and indicated by 5 or more:”

As far as I’m aware there is no other diagnosis in the DSM that hinges exclusively on the lack of one experience. Oftentimes an inability to feel certain things are part of a diagnosis, but rarely are they the whole diagnosis because the whole point of the diagnoses in the DSM is to have a way to treat something that is causing harm or lack of functioning in someone’s life. There is no need for sexuality to be able to live a happy and fulfilled life and this whole diagnosis rests on the idea that if you do not have sexuality in your life then there is something empty or unhappy about your life.

Moving on:

“Inability to interpret sexual signals”

Now there are all kinds of symptoms listed in the DSM that people who are not mentally ill have but that only become signs of mental illness when they move into a realm where they seriously inhibit someone’s functioning or lead to high distress. Now I can imagine how you might get into some awkward situations if you can’t interpret sexual signals, but overall it doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that should be medicalized: it’s pretty damn normal and unless the other party involved also has some difficulties with reading emotions it should just mean that you don’t get into sexual situations. Oh no. How horrible.

Another way this sort of symptom was used in the past was in medicalizing lesbians. If you can’t interpret or don’t respond to a romantic overture, there’s something wrong with you. If you can’t follow the scripts that have been laid down, there’s something wrong with you, something that needs to be treated. In reality, it may simply be that you follow your own script or no script at all and that’s totally ok.

“Uncomfortable in intimate situations with a partner”

So I have a serious problem with this particular criterion because this whole disorder is circulated around an inability to feel sexual attraction. That implies that the intimate situation here is sexual. That’s a whole lot of assuming that the only intimate situations you’d ever be in would be sexual. There are all sorts of intimacies and personally I think it’s a bit gross to eliminate them all because SEX. There are also many, many people who are uncomfortable in sexual situations with partners for a variety of reasons and this criteria doesn’t touch on ANY of them (including abuse, PTSD, different priorities, etc). It also doesn’t specify frequency of discomfort, which seems important as probably everyone has felt uncomfortable in intimate situations at one point or another.

Generally discomfort at a situation is only diagnosable when you need to be able to function in that situation in order to have a complete and fulfilled life. I think there are many people out there who could attest that sex is not necessary for a complete and fulfilled life with intimate relationships, which makes this criterion really bizarre. There’s really nothing wrong about having discomfort or preferences against some stuff, and saying that we all need to be comfortable in the same settings is really a set up to oppress some people. Yes, being uncomfortable in all social settings or all settings outside of the house might be something that really interferes with your life, but sexual situations are specific, private, intimate, and unnecessary for day to day functioning.

If you’re really not interested in something and another person tries to get you to do it, it is 100% reasonable to feel uncomfortable. Generally we only want to label something as mental illness if the emotions or reactions are far outside of reasonable or logical.

“Avoidance of situations in which sexual activity may occur”

Um…so if you’re a priest you have symptoms of mental illness? If you choose to be celibate? Lots of people can make it through their lives without sexual activity. In other news, not feeling sexual attraction does not imply that you have to avoid sex. Unrelated! Crazy! Throwing these symptoms together is just illustrating a complete misunderstanding of what it’s like to be asexual.

“Lack of attraction to the opposite or same sex”

This is extremely sloppily written. What kind of attraction? What about non-binary people? Do friend urges count? If they don’t then we’re really looking at something far more akin to antisocial personality disorder. I think it’s implied that those are not the kinds of attraction that the author is thinking of but rather sexual attraction. What is wrong with not feeling sexual attraction if there’s nothing about it that hurts you or anyone else? It’s not like a lack of empathy that leads you to undertake cruel behaviors, it simply leads you to seek out different relationships for yourself. I’m really failing to see the problem.

At its heart this criterion says there’s one way to be human and that’s a sexual way, not because asexual people say they’re unhappy but because the author can’t imagine a different way. Why is this any less discriminatory than making it an illness to have a lack of attraction to the opposite sex?

“Complete lack of sexual thoughts”

My biggest problem with this is that I don’t think it exists unless you’ve got a hormonal imbalance, which is not related to mental illness but simple physical health. There are absolutely people that don’t feel sexual thoughts towards anyone or who rarely have sexual thoughts, but our bodies are filled with hormones that give us certain reactions and that doesn’t stop happening just because of your orientation. As an analogy, if a gay man is given a blowjob by a woman, oftentimes his body will react even if he doesn’t feel an attraction or particularly want the blowjob. It is possible to orgasm during rape. Our bodies react to things.

The other problem is that things like age can also play a role here. Hormones change with age, and some people’s testosterone and other happy sexy hormones just go down as they age. And then they stop thinking sexual things. It’s actually super normal and healthy. So why the compulsory sexuality?

“Touch aversion”

Ok so this is one of the criteria that I think has a little bit of merit in that there is a fair amount of research that shows that human contact is really good for your mental health. People who get hugs or hold hands or what have you tend to be happier. But there is also a lot of evidence that people simply exist on a spectrum of sensory sensitivity and for those who are extremely sensitive touch can be overwhelming. That’s a simple fact about the way their bodies process touch. Perhaps it has something to do with a medical condition (physical), but probably it’s just like different pain thresholds. We have them and for people with high pain thresholds it’s kind of a nuisance but you adapt.

I am one of those people who is fairly touch averse. I am not a hugging type person. I am not a kissing type person. I generally like my space. I cannot cuddle through the night (except with a cat). But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t times that I feel incredibly comforted by touch with someone I trust and care about. It doesn’t mean that I’m broken, just that I need touch in a different way. It really hasn’t been a big deal in a lot of my relationships except that I yell “STOP TICKLING ME!” fairly often when the other person is not intending to tickle me at all. People get their boundaries, move on.

“Inability to experience romantic relationships”

This is unrelated to sexual attraction. Sex and romance are not the same. Romantic relationships are possible without sex. Not feeling romance is also not a super big deal. Someone needs to read asexuality 101. I really have no more ways to say “it is possible to have a fulfilled and happy way full of great relationships without sex and romance”. These symptoms are basically saying “I prioritize romance so much that the only way I could imagine not having it is if I was crazy”.

“Social isolation”

Where did this come from?? Especially because later in the definition it specifies that you would be capable of holding down close personal relationships of a nonsexual or romantic nature, so it contradicts itself. Not dating is not the same as social isolation. Saying that it is is basically telling everyone there’s one way to have a family or be around other people and if you don’t do it that way you’re sick.

“Inability to become sexually aroused”

This is seriously not on par with nor related to a lack of sexual attraction. The symptoms that they give as evidence of “lack of sexual attraction” for the most part have nothing to do with sexual attraction. The ability to become aroused is 100% biological: does your body respond to certain stimuli. Attraction has to do with feelings towards someone. If you can’t become sexually aroused at all and you have a problem with it, it’s probably a question for your medical doctor not your psychologist. But of course none of these symptoms can be the result of something medical as per criterion b.

“It would manifest as something similar to schizoid PD, in which the individual is rather socially detached. However, unlike schizoid PD, this person would take enjoyment in other types of close relationships, such as with family or platonic friends. Additionally, they would not exhibit flattened affect, excepting in sexual situations. In this dimension, this individual does not possess the skills to understand or interpret social cues. A person may develop this due to either a predisposition to a schizotypal-like PD, lack or disregulation of hormones, or a lack of physical contact in childhood.”

So basically nothing would be wrong with this person except that they don’t want to have sex. Oh no! How horrible! Their life must be empty! The basic take home message is that if someone is not feeling a desire for sex then they must be unhappy or wrong. This is a pretty common feeling among a lot of people: if you’re not having or wanting sex, there must be something wrong with you and you should probably fix it. But simply having different desires, priorities, ways of relating, or ways of expressing intimacy doesn’t mean anything about your ability to live a good life. Throughout history psychology and medicine have turned difference into illness so that they have a legitimate way of trying to eradicate it. You’re a woman who likes sex a lot? Medicate. You’re gay? Stamp it out, it’s a disease. You’re a kinkster? Better see your doc.

Many of the symptoms presented above boil down to “you don’t feel the way that I’m used to people feeling”, or tie together something painful but unrelated with the different way of feeling. Many of them point at things that are often a sign of illness (lack of sex drive) and say that they are ALWAYS a sign of illness. Together, these allow a doctor to say that difference is actually a problem because it causes unhappiness. In reality the unhappiness is more likely caused by stigma and oppression.

So if you’re thinking about introducing a new medical definition let’s think about whether the symptoms are actually causing pain in someone’s life rather than just are something that doesn’t make sense to you, shall we?