Manufacturing depression (72 page)
Read Manufacturing depression Online
Authors: Gary Greenberg
Waters, Ethel,
264
Watson, John,
99
–100
Wellesley College,
107
Welsh, John,
2
–6
Wernicke, Carl,
325
Westen, Drew,
307
–8
Wharton, Edith,
91
Wheatley, David,
261
Wiley, Harvey,
206
Woese, Carl,
330
–31
Wong, David,
10
–11
Woolf, Virginia,
111
Xanthines,
219
Yale University,
107
“Yellow Wallpaper, The” (Gilman),
93
Young, Brigham,
323
A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR
Gary Greenberg is a practicing psychotherapist and author of
The Noble Lie
and
The Self on the Shelf.
He has written about the intersection of science, politics, and ethics for many publications, including
Harper’s, The New Yorker, Wired, Discover, Rolling Stone,
and
Mother Jones,
where he’s a contributing writer. He lives in Connecticut.
*
Historians of antiquity tell us that while there was a physician named Hippocrates, the body of work attached to his name (much of which is in the first person) was mostly written by his disciples. For purposes of simplicity, I use “Hippocrates” to refer to the composite character who emerges from the Hippocratic corpus, not the individual (about whom we know very little).
*
In this at least Freud proved to be right. Ellis was married to an openly gay woman, was impotent until he was sixty, and was turned on by the sight of urinating women.
*
It’s hard to say exactly what the toxic dose is because virtually all MDMA research is designed to prove how dangerous the drug is, rather than to establish whether there is a safe dose.
*
This turns out to be a vast underestimate. Scientists now think we have 100 billion neurons in our brains.
*
Unless you count penicillin, which, in the late 1940s, Pfizer figured out how to mass-produce. Doctors gave it to neurosyphilitics. The results were dramatic and certainly buoyed hopes that mental illnesses could be cured with a drug. But Thorazine, unlike penicillin, was a psychiatric drug from the beginning.
*
I’m not sure why Klerman called this Calvinism. I think he was trying to get at the Protestantism embedded in the antipathy to unearned pleasure, which probably goes back at least to Luther, and maybe ultimately to St. Paul. Calvin, I suppose, is the post-Reformation figure with the sternest reputation, and the godfather of the Jonathan Edwards–led first Great Awakening, which spread the suspicion of earthly pleasure across the New World, but if it were up to me, I’d have called it pharmacological Methodism. Because according to Calvin, you are predestined to salvation; nothing you do can stop you from going to Heaven or the other place. But Klerman makes it clear that drug users can be saved from perdition—not by faith alone, but by the works of the doctors and scientists who turn feeling better into feeling well.
*
You wouldn’t know this from reading the scientific literature, either. Of those thirty-eight trials considered successful by the FDA, thirty-six were published in professional journals. Only fourteen of the unsuccessful trials saw print, however. And,
according to a team of reviewers
, the papers reporting eleven of those studies were written in such a way as to convey a “positive outcome,” despite what the FDA said. A doctor reading every paper published would therefore be correct to conclude that 94 percent of antidepressant trials were successful.
*
I’d give you more details of this session, but all participants agreed to keep confidential the clinical work and role playing we witnessed.
*
This proposal would help the depression doctors make good on what is perhaps their strongest claim: that because melancholia is unresponsive to external circumstance, it must be the result of internal dysfunction. But a problem remains: who gets to decide which depressions are meaningful and which are neurochemical noise?