Read Online Manufacturing depression by Gary Greenberg - Free Book Online Page A

I had created both the grounds and the opportunity for cure of my depression by endeavoring to write about it—made me laugh, which itself made me feel even better.
    Call me self-involved (and after one thousand words of this tale, how could you not?) but I thought this episode made a good story, one that captured the self-consuming experience of my depression, that provided a natural springboard into its history, that commented on my professional interest in the subject and my skepticism aboutwhat the doctors were up to. That’s the one I was prepared to tell my Mass General doctors, had they asked.
    In 1971, when Philip Larkin wrote “This Be the Verse,” psychiatrists assuredly would have asked about these particulars and would at least have feigned interest. We lived under a different climate of opinion then, the one that Adolf Meyer, with his focus on personal biography as the source of everyday suffering, did so much to usher in. Larkin, incidentally, stole his title from Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Requiem” , written in 1879, a poem that invokes its own climate of opinion:
     
Under the wide and starry sky,
     
Dig the grave and let me lie.
     
Glad did I live and gladly die,
     
And I laid me down with a will.
     
This be the verse you grave for me:
     
Here he lies where he longed to be;
     
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
     
And the hunter home from the hill.
     
    Stevenson got his wish; those are exactly the lines engraved on the stone underneath which Larkin no doubt meant to set him spinning. In a century, Larkin was claiming, human life had changed from the celebration of a journey that ends in peace to a calamity that can’t end soon enough.
    The novelist Stanley Elkin once wrote, “ Life is either mostly adventure or it’s mostly psychology. If you have enough of the one then you don’t need a lot of the other.” You can see the truth of this zero-sum equation in the vast difference between Stevenson’s wide-eyed world traveler and Larkin’s grumbling explorer of the interior world, between the man who lives and dies glad to have been given the chance and sees even in death the evidence of benevolence inthe universe, and the man who has no end of complaint about his lousy childhood and, by extension, about the raw deal of human existence.
    Whether or not this is the change in human character that Virginia Woolf famously claimed occurred on or about December 1910, it is clear that even as Adolf Meyer was democratizing mental illness, a transformation was under way. And while Woolf and her Bloomsbury circle, with their avant-garde literature and art, may have fancied themselves to be at the cutting edge of the change, it was a Viennese Jew who led the Victorians from adventure into psychology by pointing out that our lives were conducted over the deepening shelf of ocean that he called the unconscious.
    Without Sigmund Freud, who would think to tell the kind of story I just did about the immolated family? Who would think to locate the source of his misery in the intimate details of his own private past? Like the idea of magic-bullet medicine, the notion that our personal history makes us who we are, that our troubles come from a mum and dad whose troubles were handed to them by theirs, is so much in our bones that it is easy to forget that it once didn’t exist.
    Take the idea that depression is anger turned inward, for instance. You’ve probably heard that truism before—maybe from a friend or a therapist, or in a novel or movie—but without knowing that it originates in Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia.” Those two states, Freud says, are clearly related to each other, but in their differences we can see just what the problem is in depression. Mourning, with its “painful mood , the loss of interest in the outside world…turning away from any task that is not related to the memory of the deceased” is an extreme state, to be sure. But it also seems in some way