Just A Brain

You can boil everything a living being does, feels, thinks, and is, down to a chemical, biological level. Most of the time, we don't want to do that, because it feels a little....well, dehumanizing.

Sometimes, though, we have to dig below the surface. Sometimes it's necessary to stop thinking in terms of 'what human event caused this' and think in terms of 'what biological event is causing this'. We're making progress.

For instance, when we get the flu, we no longer try (most of us) to determine whether the funny looking old lady next door gave us the evil eye. We say, Ok, we know how this works, I picked up a bug from somewhere. When we try to treat or cure the flu, we don't do it by putting the witch on trial, but by taking medicines and using certain health strategies, like keeping hydrated and getting plenty of rest. When we try to prevent the flu, we use such methods as washing hands more often, being careful about contact with others who are or have been ill, and possibly taking a vaccine.

We're coming around to applying this to other things. It's no longer socially acceptable to assume that a person who is gay must've been sexually assaulted as a child. Science has postulated that certain types of mental 'wiring' (as opposed to traumatic events with a church, or perhaps influence of evil) may influence a person toward atheism. Criminals aren't assumed to have had a traumatic childhood.

In other words, more and more, we're learning (and accepting, which is slower) that what we are, what we like, and how we feel, think, and believe, all have biological bases.

So, why are we still blaming people for being depressed? For suffering anxiety? For mental illness? Compulsions? Why do we say, oh, you must've been frightened by a stinkbug as a child, haha, and oh, it's jsut all you're going through right now and it'll get better, and you're just obsessing over it too much, let it go?

You know what? Happiness is chemical. Happiness happens when the brain makes certain chemicals and releases them and they're received in certain ways by receptors that I don't know enough about to talk about scientifically. Sometimes the brain sort of, I don't know, forgets how to make those chemicals. Some drugs can cause this- some drugs make you happy because they make the brain produce more of these chemicals, flooding the brain with pleasure, and then, when you don't have them, the brain is like, um, wait, how do I do that again? And sometimes the brain just has trouble making them anyway, without any drug use involved.

And what happens then is, we blame ourselves and fight it and think, why can't I be happy? I've got so much good in my life. When what we're suffering is a medical condition, no different than that flu. It's something that went wrong in the body chemistry somewhere, and has to be fixed, not waited out, just like you don't wait out a cancer or an infection. Doctors have medicines that balance the chemically stuff that I obviously don't know what I'm talking about but I know it exists, and it's not weakness to need it, any more than it's weakness to have a broken bone or blood clots.

So there.