This is a follow on piece of sorts to More Than Pain gets Killed, which looked at the idea of people on high doses of strong medications, may be missing out on the ability to process feelings and emotions. And any medication really can have an effect, so it should be considered, just as alcohol would be. Something that many people use to dull their emotions or avoid experiencing things in what we might call a sober manner. Many have their vices and mother’s little helper as it used to be referred to.

Anxiety is another one that came to mind that seems to be widely assessed as needing medicating these days, at a time in your life when you are clearly having a struggle and feeling apprehensive, or worried, or fearful for something real happening in your life. To then think that certain people go ahead and prescribe them, and then the struggling person takes the mind altering-drugs to try and deal with that, thinking it will solve the problem. Or at least maybe allieviate it. Yet, in my mind, you have split the problem and created two for yourself. Firstly, you aren’t dealing with the situation, you are needing assistance with it, from a faceless compound who will just ‘help’ you and not expect anything from you. So, not experiencing and learning from the feelings, the natural feelings that are often there to signal to you, that something isn’t quite right. Or you aren’t quite ready yet, or you don’t know enough, or you are just nervous. And if you aren’t able to differentiate between those feelings or understand they have different name, or stressors, or how they developed, they why would dampening your emotions and feelings help with that? Secondly, when faced with a similar problem or entirely new one in the future, which triggers those same feelings or slightly new ones, what happens then? Does your brain have any reference point for when it coped before? Does it know that certain feelings are entirely appropriate in certain situations and shouldn’t, in fact, be switched off or inhibited? And maybe the brain remembers what it did before and goes to the doctor for the same method of ‘coping’ as before.

It’s not just medication, though, that can help to distract or distort a reality that is sometimes quite needed to give you the tools to understand yourself and the real world. But having a multitude of various forms of escapism isn’t turning out to be healthy at all, people choosing preset characters, constructed worlds, sanitised interactions in place of real stimulation and experience. Because for some, they don’t seem to be able to assimilate real things and real people happening in real time, with the expectation of things being able to be paused, reset, done again or wanting to fully control the interaction. With a complete emotional collapse often following if something doesn’t go how they expected it to or wanted it to.

Where expectation meets reality, and many a disappointment can be had, depending on how you set yourself up in the first place. But it seems many can’t deal with the feelings that go along with disappointment, which is why it is perhaps so incredibly important to teach children how to understand feelings and emotions. To give them the language and understanding skills for them to able to process them. And hopefully, that can at least set people in good stead to go forward in life and perhaps be a little more prepared for what may come. Life is weird enough as it is, but in these strange and crazy times, being able to deal with things and keep your head really does seem quite important…

(c) MKW Publishing