/lit/ - Literature

>Antidepressants more or less diminish the identity insecurities of individuals who feel chronically inadequate, and they regulate action for as long as they are ingested – at least when the depression does not resist them. Long-term treatment takes over from cure because, indeed, antidepressants are antineurotic medications: they place conflicts at a distance. Extending their use makes it hard to distinguish between a mood disorder a person might have during a depressive episode, a neurotic symptom expressing a person’s unconscious conflicts, a temperament resulting from the chance effects of family genetics, or, very simply, various social traumas linked to contemporary lifestyles. This analysis can be found in the most prestigious psychiatric journals as well as in psychiatry textbooks and literature for general practitioners. This paradoxical situation, in which the medication is invested with magical powers while the pathology becomes chronic, should move us to ask questions about the limits of illness.

>One thing seems certain in the conflictual model: well-being is not a cure. This is because being cured involves the ability to suffer and to tolerate suffering. From this point of view, being cured is not at all the same thing as being happy. It means being free, recovering a power over the self that will let us “decide if we want this or that.” If we accept the idea that health is the ability to go beyond our own norms, we need to distinguish between happiness and freedom, between well-being and cure. If an individual in good health is up to the various bumps and bruises of existence, and able to go beyond his norms, I would also add that, in terms of psychic disorder, he can do so only because he is conflictual. Conflict is both engine and brake