Some Things Should Be None of Our Business : Depression Should Be Least of Our Worries When Determining if Candidate Can Govern

The TV blurb said, “Dukakis denies reports of having mental illness: News at 11.” That is, of course, precisely the come-on that Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. and his sleazy band hoped their innuendoes would accomplish. People hear the words mental illness and think of Thomas Eagleton, people ranting on street corners, the “night stalker,” the “Snake Pit.”

This slimy episode raises several interwoven issues that deserve disentangling. One is the general matter of rumor mongering in political campaigns, along with witless cracks designed to insinuate untruths (President Reagan calling Michael S. Dukakis an “invalid”; Joseph R. McCarthy referring to Adlai E. Stevenson as “Alger . . . Oops, I mean Adlai . . . .”). We are entitled to ask whether such tactics are harbingers of GOP election strategy.

The second issue is the matter of invasion of privacy and what the public deserves to know. A Wall Street Journal editorial, while admitting that Dukakis might be “the victim of an unfounded smear,” also said, snidely, “ . . . there is something curious going on here.” Why, it wondered, did Dukakis suppress his medical information in the name of privacy, when he asked for medical records from prospective vice presidential candidates and asked them all sorts of questions?

This is a fair question, but it should make us think carefully about the limits of the public’s need to know. I want to know whether a candidate is in good physical health; do I need to know whether his marriage is in good psychological health? I want to know whether a candidate is seeing a physician for a heart condition; do I need to know if he is seeing a marriage counselor for his marital condition?

Our culture and the media are suspicious of people who insist on their privacy. During an interview several years ago, actor Alan Alda told a reporter that his early experiences in therapy were not for public discussion. The reporter pressed him: “Otherwise,” the reporter said, “readers might assume the problem was more acute than it probably was.” (Note the slyuse of probably .) Alda’s answer: “It’s really none of their goddamn business.” The insatiable public, so used to hearing intimate details of public lives, needs to be reminded that some things are none of our goddamn business. As citizens, all we need to know about a candidate is whether he or she is fit to govern.

This, of course, raises the third issue: Does depression, regardless of whether or not Dukakis had it or was treated for it, affect a person’s ability to govern? Some of the greatest statesmen in history, including Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, suffered debilitating black clouds of depression. So have great artists, writers and reformers. Depression never stopped them from doing what they had to do. Indeed, one could make an excellent argument that occasional depression is the sane response to troubled times, and that anyone who never feels depressed is the one with the mental-health problem.

But in our society depression stands as a gloomy reproach to those who take seriously their rights to the pursuit of happiness. God help anyone who isn’t 100% happy all the time; he or she must be “sick.” Why else would it even be a smear to accuse Dukakis of having been depressed? Considering the occasions reported to have set off his unhappiness--the death of his brother in a hit-and-run accident, and his losing a reelection bid--we should be worrying if he hadn’t been depressed.

Depression, in any case, is not something that people “have,” like freckles; it is a normal trough in life’s highs and lows. A significant minority of the population will linger in that trough too long, which raises the next issue: What’s wrong with asking for help in getting out of it? Is it really more admirable to suffer in silence? This issue may divide current generations of Americans much as the divorce issue used to.

Joseph Veroff and his associates at the University of Michigan have been tracing the mental health of Americans over the last decades. They found an important generational shift in the value placed on seeking help, even on “talking things over.” Older generations, the researchers reported, “were more likely to see no solutions to the problems they faced (and) to have a sense of resignation about their miseries.” The younger generations saw value in seeking help and “talking intimately with other people.” One recent book estimates that 40% of the population will see a psychotherapist for various problems in living at one time or another. Perhaps one day a politician will not find it a political liability to join them.

The final and most interesting issue in this episode is that it offers the chance to begin a discussion about the psychological qualities that are dangerous in political leaders. If we are going to worry about a politician’s mental health, let’s start with paranoia--of the sort that made Richard M. Nixon regard honest critics as vicious enemies, the sort that led him to commit high crimes and misdemeanors in office. Let’s worry about the mental health of politicians who have no emotional connections to others, who can destroy a nation without raising an eyebrow or a heartbeat. Let’s worry about the mental health of politicians who suffer from grandiosity and narcissism. Of this list, depression ranks low in seriousness. There are no effective treatments for paranoia, sociopathy and narcissism, by the way, as there are for depression.

The only depression that I worry about in government is the national depression that a leader might cause, not the private one that he might feel in midnight reveries.