(Untitled)

[oursin]

O dear, I seem to have the okkards today, or the world has, lots of dropping stuff and tripping and minor computer hassles. Possibly due to not sleeping very well last night, due to twingey knee, which I suspect not so much hip-related as to rather dim action of mine on the legcurl machine at the gym yesterday.

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Reading this this morning in

Comments

[aedifica]

I agree. In a similar way, I find that foods that used to be delicacies just aren't that tasty to me now, because I can have them too frequently. Oh, the curse of having access to a well-stocked grocery store! *grin*

[tree_and_leaf]

I think Huizinga paints the fourteenth century as a bit more decadent and neurotic than it was - but the point you cite about the intensity of pleasure is, I think, dead on.

[oursin]

It's years, nay decades, since I read Huizinga.

[tree_and_leaf]

He was still on our reading lists, albeit hedged about with many a caution... It's a brilliant piece of historical writing, even if rather partial.

[heleninwales]

But I thought the point about depression was that it afflicts people who have no real reason to be in a state of utter despair? (I know that's the case with my own mild depression.)

Being sad, stressed and unhappy for a reason isn't depression, it's just being sad, stressed and unhappy and as soon as the reason for the unhappiness and stress goes away, the person will cheer up. It's having the symptoms without a valid cause that makes it depression, surely?

[oursin]

Being sad stressed and unhappy can cause depression - as I understand it, reactive depression is when either the despair is apparently disproportionate to the precipitating cause, or continues long after the precipitating cause has gone away. And seem to recall reading somewhere that even endogenous depression can be triggered by life events.

I think the argument - which I forgot to save link to - was that woez modern life makes us all more stressed and our braynes can't handle it therefore depression etc (and possibly even physical illness?). I am very suspicious of any argument predicated upon assumptions that the past was another country in which people were serener than they are now.

[parthenia14]

I studied the psychology of stress with a lecturer who (most unpopularly) thought it was mostly a posh word for mild everyday hassle. Absolutely no evidence that our brains can't handle modern life.

I tried to follow Sean Langan's line of thought and absolutely couldn't. Bzuh.

[redbird]

Psychologists etc. sometimes distinguish between situational depression, which is a reaction to specific events or conditions, and endogenous depression. But one can lead to the other. Sadness, in this model, is a third thing from either: crying because your grandfather has died is different from being depressed because the economy is, even though you have a job and money in the bank, and both are different from having no energy to get out of bed even though there's nothing identifiable that you're unhappy about.

I suspect that people in that third category, in marginal situations, are either chivvied into getting up and washing dishes or hoeing the field or such, or left alone to decline and die. That might be a line in a church record, that so-and-so had died and was buried on such-and-such a day; if the so-and-so was part of a peasant family, probably no more than that would be passed down beyond, maybe, a generation or two of "don't be like your Uncle Aloysius, you know what happened to him" as a discouragement to laziness.

[oursin]

I've seen enough case-notes for pauper lunatics admitted to institutions with conditions approximating some form of depression to be rather cautious about thinking that it was a luxury of the better-off classes. (There's been interesting work done on hysteria, as well, which undercuts popular notions of class basis.)

[hafren]

I wonder if the difference is that many nowadays think they have a right to be happy, that happiness is somehow the natural condition of man and that if they aren't happy at any time, it means something is wrong and they need to see a shrink (and end up not only unhappy but poor)? Seems to me it might be easier to conclude that being depressed from time to time is perfectly natural and will go away if you give it time and try to think about something else....

[oursin]

For many centuries in Western Europe, I expect clergymen saw more depression than doctors did.