Happiness: generally overrated?

Over at the strangely addictive sci-fi blog io9, Annalee Newitz recently took a look at a new study that seems to indicate depression might have a useful function in combat zones:

Will soldiers of the future be given serotonin depressors to make them depressed and therefore fearless? A new study released Friday shows that people with a low level of serotonin do not "reflexively avoid" bad situations, and are more likely to explore risky and dangerous places. This is a sorry state in everyday life, but might be desirable if you're a soldier and need to venture into spots most people would steer clear of. It's very possible the next "super soldier" drug won't give you superstrength, but just a megadose of depression.

I was reminded of this when I came across a recent Newsweek article about the "anti-happiness" backlash that seems to be sprouting, a movement that - on balance - seems perfectly logical once you stop to think about it:

Lately, Jerome Wakefield's students have been coming up to him after they break up with a boyfriend or girlfriend, and not because they want him to recommend a therapist. Wakefield, a professor at New York University, coauthored the 2007 book "The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder," which argues that feeling down after your heart is broken—even so down that you meet the criteria for clinical depression— is normal and even salutary. But students tell him that their parents are pressuring them to seek counseling and other medical intervention—"some Zoloft, dear?"—for their sadness, and the kids want no part of it. "Can you talk to them for me?" they ask Wakefield. Rather than "listening to Prozac," they want to listen to their hearts, not have them chemically silenced.

Of course, it's quite a continuum from listening to your heart in the wake of a break-up to deliberately megadosing yourself on an anti-anti-depressant in order to be more effective in combat. But then again, when I think about some of my ex-girlfriends, I guess it's not that much of a difference after all. HA! (That is totally a joke; my heart is full of peace.)

At any rate, it's very intriguing to watch our culture attempt to correct itself from the recent (decade-long) enthusiasm for SSRIs (and if you want to be cheeky, for MDMA as well). I always held the notion of anti-depressants in great suspicion, at least in terms of my own brain chemistry; I saw that it was effective for friends, but suspected it would dramatically alter my creativity and ambition. Indeed, the Newsweek article seems to suggest that kind of thinking might not be completely inaccurate:

In contrast, "once a moderate level of happiness is achieved, further increases can sometimes be detrimental" to income, career success, education and political participation, Diener and colleagues write in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. On a scale from 1 to 10, where 10 is extremely happy, 8s were more successful than 9s and 10s, getting more education and earning more. That probably reflects the fact that people who are somewhat discontent, but not so depressed as to be paralyzed, are more motivated to improve both their own lot (thus driving themselves to acquire more education and seek ever-more-challenging jobs) and the lot of their community (causing them to participate more in civic and political life). In contrast, people at the top of the jolliness charts feel no such urgency. "If you're totally satisfied with your life and with how things are going in the world," says Diener, "you don't feel very motivated to work for change. Be wary when people tell you you should be happier."

I'm in no way denigrating the obvious usefulness of SSRIs in many cases; I just believe (and have expressed quite often on this blog) that they've become an absurd "go to" for far more cases than originally intended, and society has become absurdly cynical about the circumstances in which it is willing to dole these drugs out. Frankly I wish society would just drop the pretense and admit that you don't necessarily even need to be clinically depressed to derive benefits from SSRIs, or ADD drugs, etc. (I know, like that'll happen.)

At any rate, while Newsweek is just now catching the tail of the trend, io9 leaves us with the most food for thought. Surely if anyone is going to be at the bleeding edge of figuring out how to alter our brain chemistry to make us more effective, it'll continue to be the military, yeah?