Quality of Life / The Desire to Live
I see many things in drawings, spatial terms, distances inside my head. Everything is neatly measured on graphs, often with colors for emotion. That’s how I see the issue of quality of life. Quality life is such a broad ill-defined term tossed about with regard to health or finances in general. It’s inherent subjectivity makes objective assessments feel vague, everyone holding different values and tolerances. For me the bottom line in quality of life would be the pure desire to live. Anything above that line is a movement toward health and anything below a movement toward death. The line itself-is made of ANHEDONIA. Moving up from the anhedonic line into quality-of-life is not a step into happiness it is a step in to struggle, possibly a very long struggle, possibly a losing battle. We might think of anhedonia as a place to rest. The problem with resting in anhedonia is its proximity to the wish to die and the ease of falling or slipping into that territory.
Drs., the mental health profession, they ask the wrong question. The truly relevant question is not “do you want to hurt yourself ? Are you thinking of suicide? The question should be “do you want to live”. That is where to start a conversation about how a person really feels.
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