The Good Drug Guide : new mood-brighteners and antidepressants

THE RESPONSIBLE PARENT'S GUIDE TO HEALTHY MOOD-BOOSTERS FOR ALL THE FAMILY

INTRODUCTION
Could we live happily ever after? Perhaps. One's interest in the genetically pre-programmed states of sublimity sketched in The Hedonistic Imperative is tempered by the knowledge that one is unlikely to be around to enjoy them. It's all very well being told our descendants will experience every moment of their lives as a magical epiphany. For emotional primitives and our loved ones at present, most of life's moments bring nothing of the sort. In centuries to come, our baseline of emotional well-being may indeed surpass anything that human legacy wetware can even contemplate. Right now, however, any future Post-Darwinian Era of paradise-engineering can seem an awfully long way off. Mainstream society today has a desperately underdeveloped conception of mental health.

There's clearly a strong causal link between the raw biological capacity to experience happiness and the extent to which one's life is felt to be worthwhile. High-minded philosophy treatises should complicate but not confuse the primacy of the pleasure-pain axis. So one very practical method of life-enrichment consists in chemically engineering happier brains for all in the here-and-now. Yet how can this best be done?


Through natural method validated by effective use for over 2000 years, it is possible to enrich one's life.

To declare that only neuropsychopharmacology is the answer, one would have to study an area of pharmacology that treats the sick brain.

As well, the wise person has to detach from the delusion that one's life history made her this way.

In reality, a sick brain is not manufactured by sick thoughts. For such thoughts are the symptom of a sick brain.

While it appears reasonable to assume that a society's embrace of the culture of a sick soul may contribute to a sick mind, it cannot be concluded that such artificial constructs are manufactured by a sick brain.

Rather, it appears that quite possibly, the sick mind is a symptom of the sick brain.

Thus the negativity and pessimism of a depressed person with attendant anxiety and paranoia are all but symptoms of a very ill brain.