And What Science Can
Do About It
And What Science Can
Do About It
#27“If you have depression, this sad mood along with other symptoms can last weeks, months, or even years if not treated. Depression isn’t a sign of weakness or a character flaw. It’s a real medical condition, but there are ways to successfully treat depression.... Depressive disorders affect about 34 million American adults.”—the Learning About Depression webpage on the Zoloft website
“Even though your depressing thoughts may be distorted, they nevertheless create a powerful illusion of truth. Let me expose the basis for the deception in blunt terms—your feelings are not facts! In fact, your feelings, per se, don’t even count—except as a mirror of the way you are thinking. If your perceptions make no sense, the feelings they create will be as absurd as the images reflected in the trick mirrors at an amusement park. But these abnormal emotions feel just as valid and realistic as the genuine feelings created by undistorted thoughts, so you automatically attribute truth to them. This is why depression is such a powerful form of mental black magic. Once you invite depression through an ‘automatic’ series of cognitive distortions, your feelings and actions will reinforce each other in a self-perpetuating vicious cycle.”—Feeling Good, David Burns, MD, “The Clinically-Proven Drug-free Treatment for Depression,”
so this, somehow, is what happens to 34,000,000 Americans at least some of the time, yet the whole idea of cognitive therapy for depression, is choosing to be optimistic, and to trust yourself.
ut we could expect Dubya to fit the pattern of Dr. Burns’ cognitive distortions of modern Western depression. If you had an attitude of “In these cases the victim would be response-able but in those cases he wouldn’t be, and here’s why…,” Dubya’s all-or-nothing thinking and overgeneralization would likely see this as a decaying of personal responsibility. A mental filter, and disqualifying the positive about victims, wouldn’t let Dubya, or victims who believe in his ideas, see how much the victims had taken response-ability for their own welfare, in that the poor and the homeless, other than alkies druggies and the like, probably have tried a lot. What’s supposedly wrong with the victims would get magnified as if it’s the entire problem that has to be eliminated, and what’s wrong with the sinners would get minimized since attention paid to this would constitute blame. The victims would get all of the uncompromising and indispensable Should Statements. People’s perceptions of causality would be so distorted that much would get labeled and mislabeled. And just imagine saying to Dubya, “But I’m not cause of those negative external events, so I’m not primarily responsible for how they affect me!”. Add to this the fact that Dubya’s “A Charge to Keep” is certainly emotional reasoning, and you could see the same old self-blame of victims coming from above as well as from below.
One example of both of these forms of victim correction is on a webpage from Johns Hopkins’ school of public health, Depression Common in Single Mothers Receiving Welfare, which approaches this issue not in terms of what’s causing so much devastation, the abuse that they got that was the reason for their being single parents, or the problems that they now face maintaining their households, but in terms of, “The study looks at the factors in these women’s lives that contribute to depressive symptoms, and examines whether these symptoms may prevent the women from gaining employment and becoming independent from welfare.... ‘One challenge facing state welfare agencies is to identify barriers to employment. One such barrier — depression — is high among low-income single mothers,’ says Mary Jo Coiro, PhD, assistant scientist in the department of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.... Forty percent of the women reported symptom levels that would likely indicate a diagnosis of clinical depression, yet very few had received any mental health services. Significantly higher levels of depressive symptoms were found in woman who grew up in households receiving financial aid [If these people are bilking the system they certainly aren’t enjoying it.], who were on welfare for more than five years, who perceived less social support to be available to them, and who reported more stress in their lives.”
When you’ve seen ads and other guides that say things like this, you may have thought, “So how am I supposed to fit in with all this? These mental health services try to fix the women, not the fathers of the children, who, if they’d chosen to think in ways that would have made them satisfied and tolerable in marriages with these women, could have prevented the problems in the first place. It seems scary to try to re-engineer those who cause the problems, but if no-one’s human nature were re-engineered, all sorts of conflicts would go on unresolved. If the men aren’t re-engineered, the women would have to be, and if they refuse to have their own human natures re-engineered, even chemically re-engineered, then they’d seem scary, manipulative. If single mothers on welfare have such a high rate of depression, then maybe in some cases they ended up on welfare because of their depression. Otherwise, they would have found enough of a job. Yet no doubt in most cases, these women are depressed because of their poverty, and/or what led to it. Simply giving them antidepressants, then, is a rather brazen effort to re-engineer their brain chemistries.”
If so many men are going to treat their lovers or wives in ways that could be described as, “people and situations that lead to disappointment, failure, or mistreatment,” and, “angry or rejecting responses from others,” that a victim-blaming diagnostic category seems necessary for the women, then for the men to choose to think in more productive ways, exactly the same expectation that cognitive therapists would make of the women who they devastate, would prevent a lot of these problems in the first place. Yet en toto, each of us can change who we live with so we’re supposed to courageously change it, but can’t change anyone else’s behavior so we’re supposed to serenely accept that they act like that, which means that a lot of this abuse is going to result in single parenthood. And the Serenity Prayer was based not on ideas on how to, in the words of the prayer to Saint Anthony, “cope with the trials and troubles of daily life,” but on the Doctrine of Original Sin, so exactly what the Serenity Prayer has in mind is such things as how we could most effectively deal with those who the symptomatology of the Self-Defeating Personality Disorder describes. The self-help psychological thought that became prominent in the Reagan/Thatcher era, and its basis on unconditional whine-free self-efficacy, naturally has such common threads going through it.
When self-help books encourage self-determination for women in marriages that are bad because of their husbands, such as a professor having an affair with one of his students, the books don’t seem to have in mind 40% of welfare mothers suffering from depression, such as The Marriage Plan by Aggie Jordan, PhD, saying, “You may argue that we stay in dysfunctional situations [dysfunctional because of one person, not everyone involved] not because we want to, but because we’re afraid, or our financial condition won’t allow it, or it’s best for the children or a thousand other reasons. We do it because we want to, because we refuse to do otherwise. Our messages to ourselves keep us captive. To be free to control our own lives, we must send ourselves liberating messages [and if we weren’t unwillingly passive to someone else’s dysfunction, we’d solve the problem by sending ourselves messages to act functionally, not messages to escape at all costs],” as if the only thing that matters is whether the victims are sending red-blooded messages to themselves. Whatever the dysfunctional people do seems to be just the way that this sinful world is, and naturally we’re all expected to deal with this sinful world as it is not as we’d have it, though if they chose to act differently then this sinful world would have been different. (Sure, some of those welfare mothers are independent enough that they wouldn’t have wanted to marry the men no matter how civilized they chose to act, but most of these women probably would have.) Moral bankruptcy is to be treated like financial bankruptcy, in that if you don’t accept the right to declare financial bankruptcy this would seem unforgiving about past mistakes, and unrealistic. For the same reasons, you’d be expected to accept this much-beloved moral bankruptcy. And this “accept” means the same as “accept” does in the Serenity Prayer, in that this wouldn’t include trusting those who declare financial/moral bankruptcy, but would include doing whatever it takes to courageously liberate yourself from them.
That also assumes that if 40% of the single mothers on welfare were fortified by medication and/or choosing to think optimistically, somehow there would be enough jobs with living wages for them. When women who’ve been patched up with antidepressants have problems getting jobs that pay living wages, their dosages may have to be increased, though if our class divergence went back to where it was before the Reagan/Thatcher era, when expectations of living wages didn’t seem to be insolent utopian nuisances, then the doses wouldn’t have to be increased as often. Some may object to such a wholesale usage of medication to solve these problems, due to their being in denial about psychiatric conditions, or fears of the pharmaceutical industry maneuvering to make more money, or a dislike of people chemically altering unhappiness with mood-altering drugs, but those same objectors could say that the beleaguered women should get treatment which consists of liberating messages that they should be optimistic and resilient, and when added problems come up, higher doses of prayers of, “God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. Living one day at a time, Enjoying one moment at a time; Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it; Trusting that You will make all things right if I surrender to Your will; So that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with You forever in the next—Amen,” as long as these are effective in correcting what seems to be the problem.
When listening to Dubya lecture us on the sort of personal responsibility that all Americans take, one could get the feeling that he picked up from AA, his tendency to hold people morally accountable for their lack of red-blooded pragmatism. When you see such self-assured AA slogans as, “We are all victims of victims,” “There are no victims, just volunteers,” “The longer that we think about the bad stuff, the greater is its power to harm us,” “The best remedy for anger is delay,” “The people we hate teach us the most,” “Life is like wrestling a gorilla. You don’t stop when you get tried, you stop when the gorilla gets tired,” and, “Anger is one letter short of danger,” one could see Dubya self-assuredly advocating the same things, as reasons why his opponents had better stop their supposed victimology. Add to this the fact that the entire unredacted Serenity Prayer as originally written by Reinhold Niebuhr includes, “Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not as I would have it,” and you could see that no matter how real is anyone’s victimization, he could still be lectured for firmly refusing to accept it.
Sure, as British General Richard Dannatt said about the Iraq invasion, just after he became Britain’s army chief, “I think history will show that the planning for what happened after the initial successful war fighting phase was poor, probably based more on optimism than sound planning,” but even misplaced optimism with big consequences would seem at least excusable. Everyone needs optimism to inspire them, and we must understand that sometimes this optimism will be mistaken. If this mistake ends up causing the deaths of many Iraqis and others, one could always blame these deaths on others, insist that one can’t be morally responsible for a mistake, etc. Dannatt called this optimism “naïve,” so this criticism could seem as red-blooded as you’d expect from a general. If, on the other hand, he’d criticized it as, “presuming that the weak Iraqis would go along with what the strong expect of them,” that would have seemed mollycoddle. Dannatt also said, “We are in a Muslim country and Muslims’ views of foreigners in their country are quite clear. As a foreigner, you can be welcomed by being invited in a country, but we weren’t invited certainly by those in Iraq at the time.” If you want criticism of this invasion to seem honorable, you’d better call it “naïve,” rather than “nervy” or “chutzpah.”
Of course, one could always hold that Iraqis’ resistance to our coming into their country uninvited, is plainly and simply evil, which would make naïveté about it seem to be the anti-evil option. Sure, as Major General Patrick Cordingly, former British military commander in the 1991 Gulf War, said about this, it’s “enormously pragmatic,” and, “I think it is a very brave thing for him to say. I do agree. I think there comes a time when you have got to let Iraq get on and look after its own security.” Eventually, the Iraqis will be there a lot longer than we will. Yet it’s very easy not to see moral bravery as real bravery. And none of this even mentions the fact that the ostensible reason for the invasion was to rid Saddam of weapons of mass destruction, so any agenda to bring democracy anywhere would have to have been a hidden agenda.
(This picture was actually on the Fox News website, as if they find this sort of stout-hearted preachiness, exciting! During the German Romantic era, this state of mind was certainly what seemed exciting!)
This is Dubya lecturing us about how we should support the war in Iraq since the insurgency might as well be Nazis, long after most of the American public lost their support for the war. Sure, it was based on the pretenses that Saddam still had weapons of mass destruction, which have now been proven to be very unfounded. Folksy populism would usually say that when anyone is that reckless in making guarantees that people are supposed to count on, we should feel confident that this will have consequences. Yet this doesn’t seem to apply to Dubya’s schpiel, which holds that if you do hold Dubya morally responsible, then you’re the one who’s morally bad. But when Republican senator Pat Roberts said it’s long been known that the prewar assessments “were a tragic intelligence failure,” this certainly didn’t imply that if you don’t support a war that was based on a tragic intelligence failure, then there’s nothing morally wrong with that. As you could see in all the AA slogans which anathematize untermensch feelings while taking übermensch feelings and behaviors as they are and not as the untermenschen would have them, anyone could preach anything in a lecturing fashion, no matter how amoral or immoral it is.
And one very noticeable feature of victim correction as a panacea is that much of the time it serves basically as a legal fiction. One example of this is the person who is unemployed during an economic downturn, along the lines of, “Once I built a railroad, made it run, made it race against time. Once I built a railroad, now it’s done. Brother, can you spare a dime?,” but he’s held just as accountable for his unemployment and financial troubles as if he chose to be lazy. The reasoning for this may have very little to do with whether or not he’s to blame for unemployment that he didn’t have when the economy was better. One real reason for holding him accountable would be that it seems that government that’s too stringent would be the only alternative to occasional high unemployment. Another would be that if we accept excuses, then people would use them just as readily when they’re not valid. Yet these wouldn’t change the fact that in that particular person’s case, he’s not to blame, unless you assume that his personal response-ability for his own welfare is ad infinitum so as long as he doesn’t have a job he has to try harder to get one. Since this wouldn’t change the current unemployment rate, this would mean that there would always be that rate of people who’d be blaming themselves for not trying hard enough or well enough to get hired. Another example of this is the woman whose husband regularly chooses to act like a butthead. She’d be held just as accountable as if she really did “ask for it,” and as if it doesn’t really matter that, if he treated those outside his family or intimate relationship like that, he’d seem uncivilized. One reason for blaming her would be that blaming him would seem to be an iron-handed attempt to make the world as she’d have it by re-engineering human nature. Another would be that we can’t accept excuses from people in her position, either. Therefore, what you end up with is blaming her for something that really isn’t her fault. Unless such men choose to get new wives by stopping the problem behavior rather than by manipulating them into thinking that these men are normal, there will always be the same rate of problem men who seem marriageable, so there would always be basically the same rate of women who’d be blaming themselves. As Louise Hay wrote, “When you no longer think that way, they will go and do that to somebody else.”
After all, some books by Dr. Albert Ellis are titled How to Control Your Anxiety [and the same would apply to depression or any other bad feeling] Before It Controls You, and How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable About Anything—Yes, Anything, so this could just as readily used for a dilemma where 40% of the people suffer depression, and where the problem may or may not have been caused by people and situations that lead to disappointment failure or mistreatment, as for any other dilemma. After all, even if 40% of those in a given situation suffer depressive symptoms, 60% don’t, so we could always see the depressives’ responses as depending on what their pre-existing attitudes and outlook were. Also, it seems that we wouldn’t want to give the mollycoddle 40% any advantage in having this sinful world as they’d have it. If you looked at this logically you’d see that it’s morally bankrupt to varying degrees depending on the situation, but if you looked at this “realistically,” you’d see that we mustn’t be aware of things that would so deflate our optimism and dis-courage us, and that since Jesus’ main prayer for us says “we also have forgiven our debtors,” we must forgivingly allow for all sorts of bankruptcy. Sure, Bob Woodward’s book about the Iraq war is titled State of Denial, but being in denial about the problems in Iraq would turn on much of Dubya’s political base, and could get the approval AA’s positive-thinking transcendent spirituality. Exactly what constitutes a state of denial about a complicated and unpredictable situation, when given in the real world where naturally people sometimes exaggerate, could be a matter of opinion, and those who are serene would tend to have very accepting opinions.
Along these same lines is a webpage by Intelihealth, an Aetna company, Depression in the Workplace, which begins, “Clinical depression has become one of America’s most costly illnesses. Left untreated, depression is as costly as heart disease or AIDS to the US economy, costing over $43.7 billion in absenteeism from work (over 200 million days lost from work each year), lost productivity and direct treatment costs1.” If that’s how we look at depression, which provably correlates with the causes and/or effects of single parenthood, then it’s no wonder that Western depression tends to come with victims’ absolutist unconditional self-scrutiny.
Darkness Visible began as a lecture given at a symposium on affective disorders sponsored by Johns Hopkins’ Department of Psychiatry, so clearly they were aware that for 40% of the single mothers on welfare to have the symptoms of clinical depression, is something that should be taken far more seriously than as stumbling blocks to their being self-reliant. Then again, to take seriously the depression described in Darkness Visible wouldn’t threaten any of our conceptions about self-reliance and the inevitabilities from the Doctrine of Original Sin. Since welfare mothers, who the moralists like to portray as willfully getting away with something, have almost half suffering the symptoms of clinical depression, then they’re not choosing not to be self-reliant, and accepting “boys will be boys” behavior along the lines of the Doctrine of Original Sin would be incompatible with self-reliance unless we chemically re-engineer the victims’ human nature. That is, if you assume that if so many welfare mothers weren’t devastated or were re-engineered, that would mean that less Americans would be unemployed or underemployed, though those who believe in self-reliance are just as likely to ignore this discrepancy as they are to treat all that depression among welfare mothers as if it’s simply a snag to be corrected to optimize self-reliance. That’s how the minimization and magnification of victim correction as a panacea works, saying that whatever the victim can’t change is what must be taken as a given, and whatever he can change and his effectiveness in changing it, are what must be corrected as if this is what success or failure depends on.
Scientific research on this would look at it pretty much as an open-minded Easterner would, humanistically to find what’s most compatible with humanity and human nature, in a de-centralized fashion. Researchers would each operate independently and would have to answer to nothing besides the truth, and oriented toward the truth rather than towards what’s pragmatic, in the short term, to believe. Mary McCarthy, who wrote, “If someone tells you he is going to make a ‘realistic decision,’ you immediately understand that he has resolved to do something bad,” also wrote, “In science, all facts, no matter how trivial or banal, enjoy democratic equality,” and this also means all facts no matter how unrealistic meaning unpragmatic. Science could look at the most basic facts, such as what exactly are the burdens of the minimization of how we see the effects of sinful behavior, and the magnification of how we see the effects of victims not taking response-ability for solving their problems.
This could bring a solution in ways including: Those who actually cause the problems that lie behind their victims’ diagnoses of SDPD, PAPD, and the like, might respond to the fact that any society can afford only so much infliction of helplessness, and that these problem people are exacting more than they can afford. Of course, whether such a measure is or is not effective would depend on whether or not pigheaded people respond to it. Just as those with addictive personalities are likely to respond well to programs that treat victims’ objections and lack of perseverance as the anathemas, those with penchants that would make anyone who trusted them seem codependent, also, might respond only to something with this sort of presumption. If you don’t give quasi-sociopaths what they’d best respond to, your approach will be a failure. The approach that these people are most likely to relate to, would have a very German quality to it, looking at limits as the superego suppressing the id, the resentful imposing on the stouthearted, etc.
Yet this would hold true only if these limits come from something that seems to be a doctrinaire inhibitor. If limits come from an inability to afford more, then sure the person might be frustrated that he can’t afford more, but unless he’s so uninhibited that then he proceeds to steal what he wants, he’ll understand that physical limits are realities. Monogamy to prevent AIDS wouldn’t feel like being trapped suppressively, while monogamy to bow down to morality, would. When it comes to desires to get more lebensraum, or anything else, than we now have, our perceptions and definitions really would make the difference between frustration and relative contentment, far more than in the case of cognitive therapy’s favorite situation for changing our contentment by changing our perceptions and definitions, “Just because those around you have shown that your society has low standards for trustworthiness, doesn’t mean that you can’t choose not to have a discouragingly pessimistic outlook.” If all knew that every society can afford only so much infliction of helplessness, then he’ll realize that we simply can’t afford to inflict more than we can afford, rather than thinking of choices not to cause helplessness as restrictions imposed by rules. Antinomianism (defined here as any unforgiving disapproval of someone not minimizing others’ sinfulness in order to maximize serenity, courage, forgiveness, etc.) would become anti-Americanism, or anti- whatever your country is, since if some people inflict more than their share of helplessness through needless sinning, then those who inflict helplessness in ways that seem necessary for the economy to work, wouldn’t be able to without going over the limit of helplessness that we could endure.
The preface of Bernard B. Nossiter’s 1964 book The Mythmakers, says, “The problem [of homelessness] today is much smaller [than in the Great Depression], but I still have trouble seeing the sense in a world where some are compelled to be idle while most want more of the goods and services they could produce. Even stranger is the fact that economists are now more or less agreed, despite differences of emphasis, on the ways to achieve full employment and rising production,” but the Reagan legacy has left with us with an attitude that this expectation that few be compelled to be idle while most want more of the goods and services they could produce, is “counterproductive” if you will, (Were all those economists really counterproductive?) since we all simply must adjust to whatever The Invisible Hand deals us. Reaganomics would give the exact same label of “counterproductive” if you will to those who don’t simply deal with the needless sinfulness serenely and courageously, since self-reliance means that if it’s your problem, it’s your problem, the degree to which any sinfulness should be taken seriously is a matter of opinion and yours could seem manipulative bitter or cowardly, etc. The wives and girlfriends of buttheads using Antinomian spirituality to take their destructive choices as a given and then deal with them, is what Backlash, my own experiences, and Aggie Jordan’s idea of “liberating,” were talking about. The combination of these might even be synergistic, in that, as with many of the above welfare mothers, problems caused by another’s sins could put a person closer to the bottom of the economic food chain, and therefore more vulnerable to economic helplessness, which would naturally lead to societal reductions in optimism, confidence in results from deferred gratification, etc. Of course, this could also include flipping The Flip Game, as in, “By doing things like that, you sure are giving great opportunities to mollycoddles who get through life by playing the victim role, looking for excuses, leading political movements that tell people that they’re victimized and offer the movements as the solution, etc.! Boy, are you ever falling into their traps!”
Victim Correction as a Panacea, the Summary (Page 1)
