Ataraxic

Part of speech: adjective

Pronunciation: /ˌætəˈɹæksɪk/

Definitions

1. A drug or substance that produces a state of emotional detachment and mental calmness by reducing anxiety and tension without causing sedation
2. a substance or medication that alleviates anxiety and promotes emotional tranquility while maintaining mental clarity and wakefulness
3. a therapeutic agent that diminishes worry and psychological distress while preserving consciousness and alertness

Etymology: A painter named Apelles, so the story goes, was trying to paint the foam on a horse's mouth and kept failing. In disgust he hurled his sponge at the picture, and the splash left exactly the foam he had been chasing. The Greek skeptic Sextus Empiricus told this story around the second century AD to explain how calm of mind arrives: not by straining after it, but by giving up the chase. The calm he meant was "ataraxia", and it is the source of this word. "Ataraxia" joins the negative prefix "a-" with "tarassein", "to stir up, to trouble". The verb was a physical one first. In the Odyssey, Poseidon gathers the clouds and stirs the sea with it, and it could describe muddied water or an army thrown into disorder. "Ataraxia" was the opposite: a mind like a still pool. Rival philosophies fought over who could deliver it. Epicurus made it half his recipe for happiness, alongside "aponia", the absence of bodily pain. He believed it came from understanding that the gods do not meddle and that death is nothing to fear. The followers of Pyrrho reached it by the opposite road. They suspended judgment on every question, and tranquillity followed, Sextus said, as a shadow follows a body. The Stoics prized it too. English took the noun, first as "ataraxy" and later as "ataraxia", and had it by the early seventeenth century as a learned word for philosophic calm. For more than three hundred years the noun had no adjective to go with it. Then the 1950s brought a new class of drugs, the tranquilizers. Doctors needed a word for medicines that calmed without knocking a patient out, and they reached back to Epicurus. "Ataraxic" and its twin "ataractic" were coined as pharmacological terms, built by adding the ordinary adjective ending "-ic". One antihistamine prescribed for anxiety, hydroxyzine, was sold under the brand name Atarax. The tranquillity that Greek philosophers sought through a lifetime of reasoning was now available as a pill.

Synonyms: calming, serene, tranquil, peaceful, untroubled

Antonyms: agitated, anxious, disturbed, troubled, upset