You're saying what I'm writing about is an example of a "cope"? I get if you feel that way but that's not how it is. It's just normal, like resilience.

It's funny, because what it seems like you're saying, where you'd rather medicate your thoughts and feelings than experience them, that's the only cope.

And I think that dynamic, where people want that cope that you say you desire, is intimately connected with the pathologization of everything.

What you said is interesting. And I haven't thought that much about your comment or the topics it raises in general up to this time, but here's my current take: Do you feel you're "coping" when you have normal life experiences of ups and downs and feel those feelings and thoughts and face them and process them? Do you experience people talking about normal life and feelings with ups and downs as "coping"? You see feeling intense feelings and thoughts as "coping"?

Hm, I wouldn't really use that word, because it has negative connotations that don't apply to my situation or approach.

I believe the best approach is to feel and process your intense thoughts and feelings. That's what I do.

Coping is more like not feeling them, and eating, drinking, or medicating those feelings, or taking them out on others. Coping suggests being overwhelmed, unable to deal with, and adopting external or orthogonal or ulterior methods to handle the stress at hand rather than confronting the stress directly. That doesn't apply to me.

It suggests doing something that I don't believe in at all which is tolerating undesirable situations rather than trying to create improvements that change them.

So your coping word doesn't apply to me... but I'm interested that for you, you feel this normal emotional Arc and normal life experience (and I think valuable experience to go through so you can learn how to handle your own thoughts and feelings yourself, and know yourself more), is "coping".

Also, you are misrepresenting or misunderstanding my views. I get if you could feel triggered by it, and then project your trigger into it and thereby misrepresent it, and therefore take it that way but what I'm saying is very simple: the labels are being overused. You don't have to deny the reality of a label to say that it's overused, of course.

So what I'm clearly saying is not every emotional experience or life experience is a pathology. Going through trauma or grief or sadness and feeling sad and feeling those emotions and thoughts is not depression. It's just a normal Arc.

In fact it seems like it's very clearly not depression because depression by definition (heh :) I may have an incorrect definition here) is where you experience intense and negative thoughts and emotions but they are divorced from any particular life experience that might give rise to them. So depression is where your life is reasonably okay but you feel not good anyway. Yeah, I might have made up that definition but in any case it's very clear what I'm saying is that not every emotional Arc is depression, and in fact most emotional and life experience arcs are not depression and not mental illness in any form. They're not pathologies, they're completely normal emotional and life experiences for people.

But you misrepresent me in that I'm not saying that depression or mental illness doesn't exist. Of course it does, plenty of it around that you can see. What I'm saying is, it's like everything is being pathologized and many things are labeled as pathologies when they're not. It's simple. You don't have to deny the reality of some label to say that that label is being too liberally and incorrectly applied.

If you care about mental illness, which you seem to, that should concern you because the general application of these kind of labels would seem to dilute the real meaning and also divert resources and sympathy from people who actually suffer from those things.

Maybe you suffer from depression or not I don't know. I'm not a psychologist and I'm not interested in labeling you here with some pathology. That would be Internet Psychiatric Diagnosis, anyway: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I get that you must feel frustrated if you have depression and if you have yet to find adequate treatments, but you believe they exist. Maybe what you're saying here is a way you're expressing that.

But if you think that someone displaying emotional processing strategies, resilience and facing their thoughts and emotions, if you think that's a negative thing, then I think that is part of the sort of sickness in society that I'm talking about. Because if everything's being pathologized and all the pathologies are being medicated then we don't want people to take any personal responsibility to learn any skills or strategies to manage their own emotions at all we want them to be completely chemically dependent. But I see that as an awful violation of individual autonomy and psychic freedom, and freedom of experience.

At the same time I think plenty more mood enhancing molecules should be available: like all the chemicals that are explored in tihkal and pihkal there's got to be so many good possibilities to come out of that. and instead of simply medicating illness I believe that as a society we should provide people with psychoactive drugs that enhance mood, enhance abilities (they should be tested and safe for example) but they shouldn't be scheduled. these kind of performance enhancing, spiritual enhancing hallucinogens or an entheogens, or empathogens. I firmly believe that the prohibition of these substances is holding Society back and it's a, you know, it's a sad and unnecessary form of draconian barbarism to withhold from the general public such things like that.

But I also see that as a separate issue to the mislabeling of normal emotional arcs and over pathologization of regular experience.

There is an intersection I guess where they come together which is more effective treatments for mental illness and certainly I think that's an active area of research that could have many improvements...not that I'm an expert.

In short I think chemicals should be used as treatments for sick people, enhancements for healthy people, but they should not be used as crutches or fake substitutes for people learning emotional processing skills and resilience themselves.

I think this is extra important, because mental illness does not always just arise out of chemical imbalances or other random changes, it can come about because people do not have the skills to handle their own thoughts and emotions and life experience.

So stunting people's growth by preventing them from doing the inner work to learn their own emotional processing and psychological processing skills and resilience is actually going to lead to more mental illness I think.

And you can kind of get this sense of a vicious, corporate greed fueled conspiratorial cycle: of a medicated Society, without any skills to develop their own internal psychological resilience, constantly being pathologized by an industry that's in bed with a pharma companies so that those pharma companies can sell the medications (or rather sell their governments medications with subsidies). I'm not saying that's the case but I definitely think it's a completely plausible dynamic that could exist to some extent and you know I think it's a real danger that it could be taken to a dystopian extreme and I see worrying signs of that with his crazy over pathologization of everything.

Coming back to what you said and how you misinterpreted or misrepresented what I said I just want to reassure you that none of this means that mood enhancing chemicals have no place. They do and I think they have a very clear place as treatments for sick people who don't have the resources to handle it without chemical intervention.

But the best chemical factory in the universe is your own body. So through meditation and exercise and yoga and all kinds of other things you can change your in chemistry. The emotions and thoughts create and how you process them also changes that chemistry. What I'm saying is you have a lot more power then you may realize to alter you experience. If you've tried something and it didn't work you probably feel that's not the case. But I'm to tell you, you haven't tried everything.
But even so I think people should have freedom to ingest whatever legal and enhancing chemicals they want.

But I think if there's a chance that you personally are facing regular life experiences and emotional arcs then, rather than seeking chemical means to deal with that (which you probably call "copes") which will only invite dependence and erode your resilience, I think you should try or you can to develop those skills and I personally find that facing emotions, trying to process them, and taking like an "outside" perspective to look at situations and emotions and thoughts of yourself and other people involved is incredibly valuable and transformative.

I hope you get to where you're headed.