Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Make Me A Nice Person


Written by CLINKSHRINK (she's having computer issues and asked me to post this for her)

Periodically I like to check the search terms that people use to find Shrink Rap. Today I found one that just had to be blogged about: "What medication will make me a nice person?" My first thought was, "How do you know you're not a nice person?" Are you embezzling funds from the company expense account? Do you kick puppies and kittens? Do you park in handicapped parking spaces? Are there bodies hidden under your floorboards (if so, please let Roy out. We miss him.) There are a lot of ways that someone could be "not nice", but I have to say that the majority of seriously un-nice people I've met either don't care that they're not nice or don't have enough insight to even ask the question. If you're willing to recognize you might be having interpersonal problems you can't be all bad.

That being said, the next question is to figure out why someone might think this is an issue that is medication-responsive. There certainly are psychiatric illnesses that could make someone episodically irritable: recurrent clinical depression, premenstrual syndrome ("late luteal phase disorder" in modern parlance), hypomania or mania, the list goes on.
Medication can be helpful for these conditions. Other conditions wouldn't necessarily require medication but could be responsive to lifestyle or environmental changes: caffeinism (how much coffee AM I drinking every day nowadays? Don't ask!), sleep deprivation, alcohol abuse or other substance issues.

Finally, there are issues that aren't really your issues at all. I immigrated to
Maryland from the Land of Terminally Nice People. It took me a little while to realize that people who change lanes without signalling, who honk for no apparent reason, aren't necessarily being rude---they're just being Baltimoreans. It's how people live out here. There are people who constantly accept and make allowances for impositions that most people would never tolerate. You know the type---they say yes to everything that anybody ever asks them to do, they stay late at work because no one else volunteers to help out, they're usually the ones who finally end up cleaning out the office refrigerator because they just can't take it anymore. (They work in prison because no one else will.) When someone like that grows a backbone and starts saying 'no' and setting limits, they might get accused of being 'not nice' anymore. Good for them.

I have no idea if the googling Not Nice searcher found what they were looking for on our blog, but I wanted to leave something behind that might be useful in case they come back. Good luck.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

That was very nice of you. It was also nice of Dinah to post it for you but truly nice people would just do it and not say they did it and truly truly nice people would not comment on that at all.

Anonymous said...

Dear Anonymous:
1) It's not any less of a nice act because one takes credit for it. More humble perhaps, but nice is nice, and if you want to be noted for your nice acts, it doesn't make your check to a wonderful charity for $5 million any less wonderful because your name is on the check.
2) One of the Geeks (Roy or Clink) set it up so that when I post, it automatically says Posted by Dinah. I noted that I did this for Clink, not because I wanted to be nice (actually I was tired & cranky and saw her email at 10:30 pm, I wasn't feeling all that nice, but I do enjoy hunting for pics and Clink asks for so little in this world) but because if I didn't say I was posting for ClinkShrink, it would look like I was taking credit for her writing and that would be a NOT nice thing to do and who knows what meds she'd want to give me for that....

So to clarify: I am a nice person. Mostly. I will take credit for that because I am not humble. I posted this post for Clink because I'm sometimes mostly nice. I did not write it and I wanted to give credit where credit is due.

Go ClinkShrink!!!!

Anonymous said...

The joke in all that was at the end. I am the truly, truly not nice person who commented "on that at all". Add another truly, they are free, Quick, let me check. Just as thought, I never wrote a cheque for five million, but if I did I wouldn't want anyone to know because then they might think I was one of those nice people and come knocking on my door for cups of sugar.
If I were a nice sort of person I would be glad that you are sometimes mostly nice even when you are tired and cranky which I am a little, quite a lot of the time which may explain why I am not nice.
You should not waste time on not nice people but is was nice of you to include dear in your salutation even though if you had to say it instead of type it, it would probably have been through pursed lips, which doesn't make you any less nice. I think Prozac was a make you nice kind of drug or at least people said so when it came out. I don't know because in addition to being not nice I know too little about so much and I am sometimes a little humble so I can say that.But only sometimes. Bye, I have to go to the pharmacy now. They will say have a nice day and I will say thanks you too, which doesn't make me nice. I just got a note from a really really really really not nice and so not humble person and I thought that it was nice. At least I know they do not care if I have a nice day which I probably won't.

ClinkShrink said...

Thank you Dinah for putting my post up and for making sure I got credit for it when I was blocked from Blogger. You did a great job on the pic. You are a nice person, even your dog says so.

Dinah said...

If you were really a nice person, you'd comment on my sleep posts.

For the record, I'll happily lend out cups of sugar, and I say "Thank you, you too" to pretty much anyone who wishes me well. It makes the time pass in a more pleasant way, and I've discovered that if you lend someone a cup of sugar, they often arrive back a few hours later with a piece of cake.

Anonymous said...

Can you refer me to a doctor who can pull my tongue out of my cheek? No jokes about which cheeks.

NeoNurseChic said...

My mom and I were recently talking about my starting buspar, and she was telling me about other people she knows who either are taking meds for depression or anxiety or have taken meds for one of these things. One of her friends took a med years ago, and my mom said it was, "to make her less bitchy." She said the med really did work! Does that qualify as a med to make someone a nicer person? hehe....

Anonymous said...

Bitchiness and not niceness are not related even though they seem to be. A not nice person would not give you a cup of sugar. A bitchy person would give you the sugar but maybe spit in it first.