Transcripts

Ronald Dworkin M.D. :
The problem is that sometimes life is telling you something when you're unhappy. It's telling you, you need to change the course of your life - something is wrong.

Dr. Ronald Dworkin, author of the book Artificial Happiness…

And so if you numb yourself with artificial happiness, those alarms never go off in your mind and the results are you don't change your life, you paralyze yourself. Just a short example: a woman I interviewed for this book, she was in an unhappy relationship - she wanted to marry her boyfriend and he sort of strung her along - and she was unhappy enough she thought about leaving him. Instead she went to her primary care doctor, who gave her Prozac and she felt better. She stayed with her boyfriend for the entire year because she did feel more content. Eventually she went off the drug and she began to be unhappy again - this time she did leave him. And when I asked her, would you have left without the Prozac? And she said, "Yes, the Prozac has given me an artificial happiness that arrested my impulse to leave which I knew was already a bad relationship."

Dr. Dworkin is not against medication for truly depressed people.

The doctors have criteria for clinical depression and they should follow that criteria. But when a patient comes in particularly with a complaint about something in love or in work he or she should think twice about medicating that patient. Because that patient might be feeling an unhappiness that is productive in which he or she needs to feel in order to move forward in her life.

At somethingyoushouldknow.net I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.