Is the lack of a creative output for an individual driving societal depression?
Are we using Prozac & SSRIs for the wrong reason? |
I'm using creative in the broadest possible terms here but essentially making something with one's hands or working constructively in a physical way. Not web surfing, email writing, texting, tweeting, facebooking or pushing bits of paper (virtual or real) around in an office.
I meet so many people who consider it normal to be on anti-depressant medication. They live regular suburban lives, hold down jobs, have families and collect their prescription for Prozac / Citalopram and the like every six weeks.
But how much meaning is found in the way we collectively live today? It appears to me (and I have zero evidence to back this up just my empirical findings) that when creativity is stifled or unused we lose an essential part of being human. It seems to push us towards a sense of incompleteness, anxiety even depression.
Now, this is not to say that a creative person does not or will not have depression; that's clearly nonsense as the regular suicides of designers and artists would attest. It's more the impression I have, that unless we regularly engage in useful creative activity and physical work we become more prone to those natural moments of melancholy turning into a depressive state.
I saw a report recently in one of the UK newspapers about Doctors prescribing work on farms rather than drugs for those they felt were depressed. But what a shame we have become so disconnected from meaningful work that the only seemingly valid way to do it is via a Doctor's prescription pad.
Our society problems are merely an aggregation of our personal problems and a clear indication that it's time to look for some more meaningful and fulfilling ways to live.
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