Read Online Manufacturing depression by Gary Greenberg - Free Book Online
Authors: Gary Greenberg
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correspondence with Ted Kaczynski, using the Unabomber to blast a career opening for me. My sister says this proclivity toward witnessing and revealing violence and injustice is not a coincidence.
As Larkin says, misery of the unhappy family variety deepens invisibly underneath you, as treacherous as a drop-off in the sea. So when I met a beautiful and witty woman in the early 1980s, when I was in my midtwenties, it stood to reason that I’d fail to see certain things. Like that I was in a state of mourning, having just lost the place where I was living—a cabin I’d built in the woods and in which I’d eked out my own Kaczynski-like subsistence (although without the letter bombs)—and that it probably wasn’t such a good time to decide to get married. Or that my intended was like my mother to an extent that was later embarrassing to admit—high-strung, sure that the world owed her a living, prone to rage when it didn’t come through, and most likely to hurt the people closest to her in the process. Or that submerged in my desire to please her, to soothe her, to make her love me, was white-hot rage, hostility bordering on hatred for forcing me to work so hard in the first place.
Which I was pleased to let her act out through all the thousand or so days of our marriage. She broke windows, heaved coffee cups, once even picked up a piano bench and smashed it on the floor. I don’t think she liked being that way, and I’m sure she hated the ways I provoked her to it. That’s probably why it only took her about five seconds to decide what to do when she discovered the Other Woman. And when she left, she took away my opportunity to duck my own anger, my self-loathing, my sadness, all the counterparts inside me to her tempestuousness.
If I’d known what else to do with those feelings, I probably wouldn’t have had to marry her in the first place. Or, after we split, to pummel myself to the floor of my study. Nearly twenty years later, when I turned up at Mass General, I’d managed to marry a grown-up woman, to grow up a little myself, and to limit my exposure to that kind of craziness to my therapy practice, where my ability to withstand the violent emotions conjured by love and loss allowed me to take the risks of empathy. But my misery had a life of its own, and as I got older and my love life settled down, it seemedmost likely to appear as I approached success. Some people thwart their ambitions by getting in their own way, but that wasn’t exactly my problem. Indeed, I was having improbable success, fulfilling ambitions that I didn’t know I had, reaping benefits that I was sure I didn’t deserve, raising expectations that I was sure I could never fulfill.
Like the contract for the book before this one, in which I was going to write a chapter about my visit to a clinical trial, which I expected would yield a mother lode of evidence about the fissures underlying the antidepressant revolution. Signing it set off a barrage of self-criticism and worry and doubt well out of proportion to the difficulty of actually writing the book. I responded in the depressive’s native fashion: I procrastinated. Until I was stuck on the couch, and on an oppressive June day, when I began to feel like I was tumbling down my personal oubliette, I finally reached for the phone and called Mass General.
I’d once written a magazine story about the placebo effect in antidepressant trials. The woman who was the star of that piece had responded so well to her pill that both she and her clinician were shocked to discover that she had been taking a placebo all along. (They wasted no time ignoring that fact; her payment for participation was a year’s worth of Effexor.) She told me that immediately after her initial call to the researchers, she felt better. And when I hung up the phone and right on schedule I felt my mood lift, it was as if I had stumbled into a bad novel, or a parody of a bad novel. The absurdity of my situation—that
As Larkin says, misery of the unhappy family variety deepens invisibly underneath you, as treacherous as a drop-off in the sea. So when I met a beautiful and witty woman in the early 1980s, when I was in my midtwenties, it stood to reason that I’d fail to see certain things. Like that I was in a state of mourning, having just lost the place where I was living—a cabin I’d built in the woods and in which I’d eked out my own Kaczynski-like subsistence (although without the letter bombs)—and that it probably wasn’t such a good time to decide to get married. Or that my intended was like my mother to an extent that was later embarrassing to admit—high-strung, sure that the world owed her a living, prone to rage when it didn’t come through, and most likely to hurt the people closest to her in the process. Or that submerged in my desire to please her, to soothe her, to make her love me, was white-hot rage, hostility bordering on hatred for forcing me to work so hard in the first place.
Which I was pleased to let her act out through all the thousand or so days of our marriage. She broke windows, heaved coffee cups, once even picked up a piano bench and smashed it on the floor. I don’t think she liked being that way, and I’m sure she hated the ways I provoked her to it. That’s probably why it only took her about five seconds to decide what to do when she discovered the Other Woman. And when she left, she took away my opportunity to duck my own anger, my self-loathing, my sadness, all the counterparts inside me to her tempestuousness.
If I’d known what else to do with those feelings, I probably wouldn’t have had to marry her in the first place. Or, after we split, to pummel myself to the floor of my study. Nearly twenty years later, when I turned up at Mass General, I’d managed to marry a grown-up woman, to grow up a little myself, and to limit my exposure to that kind of craziness to my therapy practice, where my ability to withstand the violent emotions conjured by love and loss allowed me to take the risks of empathy. But my misery had a life of its own, and as I got older and my love life settled down, it seemedmost likely to appear as I approached success. Some people thwart their ambitions by getting in their own way, but that wasn’t exactly my problem. Indeed, I was having improbable success, fulfilling ambitions that I didn’t know I had, reaping benefits that I was sure I didn’t deserve, raising expectations that I was sure I could never fulfill.
Like the contract for the book before this one, in which I was going to write a chapter about my visit to a clinical trial, which I expected would yield a mother lode of evidence about the fissures underlying the antidepressant revolution. Signing it set off a barrage of self-criticism and worry and doubt well out of proportion to the difficulty of actually writing the book. I responded in the depressive’s native fashion: I procrastinated. Until I was stuck on the couch, and on an oppressive June day, when I began to feel like I was tumbling down my personal oubliette, I finally reached for the phone and called Mass General.
I’d once written a magazine story about the placebo effect in antidepressant trials. The woman who was the star of that piece had responded so well to her pill that both she and her clinician were shocked to discover that she had been taking a placebo all along. (They wasted no time ignoring that fact; her payment for participation was a year’s worth of Effexor.) She told me that immediately after her initial call to the researchers, she felt better. And when I hung up the phone and right on schedule I felt my mood lift, it was as if I had stumbled into a bad novel, or a parody of a bad novel. The absurdity of my situation—that
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