Image:Challenge_vs_skill.jpg|250px|Apathy in terms of challenge level and skill level. Clickable.|thumb poly 66 7 211 9 285 189 254 234 67 152 Anxiety poly 221 7 428 7 351 188 296 187 294 188 Arousal poly 439 7 583 7 584 149 388 236 360 194 Flow poly 582 159 583 371 389 286 389 245 Control poly 582 383 583 522 443 524 362 338 385 300 Relaxation poly 429 523 219 523 297 342 351 342 Boredom poly 285 340 208 522 66 525 66 381 252 301 Apathy poly 249 292 68 371 67 158 254 239 Worry rect 0 0 591 566 Enlarge image desc bottom-left Apathy (also called impassivity or perfunctoriness ) is a state of indifference, or the suppression of emotions such as concern, excitement, motivation and passion. An apathetic individual has an absence of interest or concern to emotional, social, or physical life. They may also exhibit an insensibility or sluggishness. Often, apathy has been felt after witnessing horrific acts, such as the killing or maiming of people during a war. It is also known to be associated with many conditions, some of which are: depression, Alzheimer's disease, Chagas' disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, dementia, Korsakoff's Syndrome, excessive vitamin D, Hypothyroidism, general fatigue, Huntington's disease, Pick's disease, progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), schizophrenia, Schizoid Personality Disorder, Bipolar Disorder and others. Some medications and the heavy use of drugs such as heroin may bring apathy as a side effect. In positive psychology, apathy is described as a response to an easy challenge for which the subject has matched skills. The opposite of apathy is flow. [1]

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History

The word "apathy" derives from the Greek ?p??e?a (apatheia) ^[2]. Also meaning "absence of passion", "apathy" or "insensibility" in Greek, the term apatheia was used by the Stoics to signify a (desirable) state of indifference for what one is not responsible for (that is, according to their philosophy, all things exterior, one being only responsible of his representations and judgments). Another way of characterizing the way that the Stoics saw apathy is as "the extinction of the passions by the ascendency of reason". ^[3]

Many Christians believe that the concept was then reappropriated by Christians, who adopted the term to express a contempt of all earthly concerns, a state of mortification, as the gospel prescribes. The word has been used since then among more devout writers. Clemens Alexandrinus, in particular, brought the term exceedingly in vogue, thinking hereby to draw the philosophers to Christianity, who aspired after such a sublime pitch of virtue.^[1 Macaulay referred to "The apathy of despair." Prescott described "A certain apathy or sluggishness in his nature which led him . . . to leave events to take their own course." The concept of apathy became more well-known after World War I, when it was called "shell shock". Soldiers who lived in the trenches amidst the bombing and machine gun fire, and who saw the battlefields strewn with dead and maimed comrades developed a sense of disconnected numbness and indifference to normal social interaction.

In 1950, US novelist John Dos Passos wrote that "Apathy is one of the characteristic responses of any living organism when it is subjected to stimuli too intense or too complicated to cope with. The cure for apathy is comprehension." US educational philosopher Robert Maynard Hutchins summarized the concerns about political indifference when he claimed that the "death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment."

Relationship with illnesses

Depression

John McManamy argues that although psychiatrists do not explicitly deal with the condition of apathy, it is a psychological problem for some depressed people, in which they get a sense that "nothing matters", the "lack of will to go on and the inability to care about the consequences". ^[4] He describes depressed people who "...cannot seem to make [themselves] do anything", who "can't complete anything", and who do not "feel any excitement about seeing loved ones". He acknowledges that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders does not discuss apathy. In a Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences article from 1991, Dr Robert Marin MD claimed that apathy occurs due to brain damage or neuropsychiatric illnesses such as Alzheimer’s, dementia, Parkinson's, or Huntington’s, or else an event such as a stroke. Marin argues that apathy should be regarded as a syndrome or illness. ^[5] A review article by Robert van Reekum MD et al. from the University of Toronto in the Journal of Neuropsychiatry (2005) claimed that "depression and apathy were a package deal" in some populations.

References

1. Csikszentmihalyi, M., ''Finding Flow,'' 1997
2. Apatheia, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, ''A Greek-English Lexicon'', at Perseus.
3. William Fleming (1857). ''The vocabulary of philosophy, mental, moral, and metaphysical''. p.&34. Reprinted by Kessinger Publishing as paperback (2006; ISBN 978-1428633247) and in hardcover (2007; ISBN 978-0548123713).
4. Apathy Matters - Apathy and Depression Psychiatry may not care about apathy, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't. by John McManamy
5. Psychiatry may not care about apathy, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't. by John McManamy