Apathy

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 in or concern about emotional, social, or physical life. He or she may exhibit an insensibility or sluggishness, also. The opposite of apathy is flow. In positive psychology, apathy is described as a response to an easy challenge for which the subject has matched skills.

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.

History

Many Christians believe that the concept was then reappropriated by early 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. 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."

Another popular Christian perspective condemns apathy as a deficiency of love and devotion to God and his works; this variety of apathy is specifically referred to as Sloth and is listed among the Seven Deadly Sins.

The modern 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 depression