Psyched Out : For Decades, Americans Have Spent Time and Money Trying to Figure Out What Was Wrong With Them. But It May Just Be That America Is the Problem.
At a recent business conference, I was one of three experts invited to address the issue of “stress,” a condition that has become so commonplace, any adult who claims not to be experiencing large quantities of the stuff might be considered un-American. * The conference brochure promised we would offer tips on managing stress and depression, a promise that made me uneasy because I am increasingly convinced that we should not be encouraging anyone to adapt to the craziness of modern life. To address the craziness itself, however, means raising threatening questions about our families, jobs, relationships, our whole society. Easier by far, if only temporarily effective, is to learn a few deep-breathing exercises.
“This woman was a mess,” the therapist on our panel told the audience about a depressed client who showed a lackluster effort in improving herself. “She had a negative attitude, didn’t exercise regularly and was wearing all the wrong colors.”
The audience, an assemblage of well-educated, mostly middle-aged business executives, chuckled. They thought she was kidding about the colors. “No, really,” said the therapist, who had described her philosophy as “eclectic--a litte Freud, a little Esalen, a little New Age.” “She needed to have her colors done. She was an April, and she was wearing red.”
This notion that a woman could maintain her equilibrium if she simply had “her colors done” reminded me of a discussion about 15 years ago with an editor at a national magazine, who had assigned me to investigate an outbreak of agoraphobia after the Three Mile Island accident. Agoraphobia, loosely translated to mean “the fear of open spaces,” has traditionally been called “the housewives’ disease” among therapists because two-thirds of the afflicted are women. The indications are disabling panic attacks, shortness of breath, accelerated heartbeats and irrational fears of imminent danger. Symptoms frequently occur after a traumatic clash with the outside world--a mugging, a rape, a nuclear meltdown. The cases at Three Mile Island were identified in the months after government vans with loudspeakers on the roofs had driven through neighborhood streets, warning the residents: “Close all windows and doors. Mothers, don’t breast feed your babies.”
My research suggested that agoraphobics were notoriously resistant to treatment. Psychologists found them unusually imaginative, creative and intelligent but extremely uncooperative when it was time to “come back to reality.” But reality wasn’t all that appealing to the Three Mile Island women anymore--they were depressed, and their breasts hurt. After spending time with these highly articulate, self-imprisoned women, I came to think of them as the canaries in the coal mines of suburbia, the first sensitive casualties in a toxic environment that would eventually affect us all. But I was also aware that women’s magazines are disinclined to publish bad news without offering a few upbeat suggestions.
I finally found one group of determined agoraphobics who were making slow but steady progress after joining a local environmental organization and becoming community activists. Getting out of the house for meetings remained a challenge--any group of Agoraphobics Anonymous would necessarily have a high absenteeism rate--but rage and anger proved sturdy motivators. Their experiences strongly suggested, as did the assignment I turned in, that lasting relief for agoraphobia did not occur by changing the perceptions of the women but by changing the pathology “out there.”
My editor was furious. “This solution is far too complicated for our readers,” she said. “This is a service magazine for women. We don’t do politics.” Rather than providing a few quick tips that could be tried by next Tuesday, I had confounded “the mental health thing with the political thing.” The information I had gathered was “far too depressing,” she said. “We want readers to feel happy when they finish our magazine.” It was my first lesson in the Valium Theory of journalism: Prose should numb the blues without trying to name the problem.
“Believe me,” I told my editor when she warned me against depressing readers with the truth, “your readers already are depressed. They’d be relieved to know they’re not alone.”
I SUSPECT THAT MANY OF THE STRESSED-OUT BUSINESS EXECUTIVES and agoraphobic housewives were suffering from a more pervasive psychological disorder. Author Kurt Vonnegut identified it 12 years ago as “a political disease,” afflicting people who lack the essential “damping apparatus” that prevents them from “being swamped by the unbelievability of life as it really is.”For those of us who are acutely depressed by the facts in our newspapers--unprecedented homelessness, double-digit unemployment, the harassment of women and homosexuals in the military, the toxic wastes fouling our deserts and oceans, the 200,000 episodes of televised violence American children are exposed to before the age of 18--there’s not much relief in the baby aspirin of “a few quick tips.” Facing the truth about the grim political realities behind our personal aches and pains would at least eliminate the paranoia that “it’s all in our heads.”
God knows, we’ve tried every other imaginable cure for our pervasive depression in the last 10 years. We’ve joined Alcoholics/Gamblers/Overeaters Anonymous, become Adult Children, chastised Toxic Parents. The New York Times reported that Americans participated in an estimated 100 million therapy sessions with licensed practitioners in the year ending June, 1992, and paid approximately $8.1 billion, not counting prescription drugs, to relieve this national despair.
These figures don’t include all the people who are trying to feel better by holding hands and humming from the top of Macchu Picchu or jumping off bridges on bungee cords--let alone all the nameless people living under the bridges. Nor do they include all the lonely readers who, in the privacy of their own homes, pore over books on co-dependence/women-who-love-too-much/ men-who-hate-them while quietly sipping or smoking themselves into oblivion. And what is the drug culture but a measure of our unremitting despair?
“The old idea of self-caused (endogenic) depression” simply doesn’t apply to sufferers of political unreality, psychiatrist James Hillman and writer Michael Ventura reaffirm in “We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy, and the World’s Getting Worse.” Hillman’s premise that many individual depressions have their roots in social issues is part of a long and honorable, if underappreciated, psychological theory. First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton espouses the “politics of meaning.” This theory by Michael Lerner is a modern interpretation of the work of Viktor Frankl, the Vienna psychiatrist who survived imprisonment at Auschwitz. Frankl dedicated his life to understanding how “good citizens” could become enmeshed in social systems capable of such atrocities. He introduced logotherapy more than 50 years ago, arguing with Freudian colleagues that individual happiness depends less on sexual fulfillment and the acquisition of power and money than on the “search for meaning.”
“Let us be alert,” Frankl wrote after World War II. “Since Auschwitz, we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima, we know what is at stake.”
Modern therapy, however, because it is deeply invested in the pleasure principle, has focused almost exclusively on the self, separating individual problems from those in our communities. When treatment programs teach disturbed citizens to cope and not protest, to adapt and not rebel, to “work within your situation” rather than “refuse the unacceptable,” Hillman concludes, “therapy is collaborating with what the state wants: docile plebes.”
When Nobel Laureate Heinrich Boll was asked after World War II what he thought the most dangerous flaw in the character of the German people was, the great novelist answered in a word: “Obedience.” We Americans, proudly rooted in a heritage of rugged individualism, do not generally think of ourselves as obedient--and yet, as Frankl observed of American culture, we have followed orders again and again to “be happy.” But since so many of us are having trouble being happy without reason, our national depression is not likely to lift until our lives are again grounded in meaning.
Most political depressions are suffered not by the perpetrators, rescuers or victims in our social order but by those who occupy the role of bystander, those who do not draft social policy but become its subjects. In any given social crisis, only the bystanders are likely to have enough time and money for therapy, the others being too busy issuing orders, running soup kitchens or staying alive. While the power of the perpetrator, the heroics of the rescuer and the suffering of the victim at first seem to dwarf the significance of the bystander, whose job is simply to witness, this cultural role might be the most critical of all. For it is the bystander who determines what passes for “normal” in a culture.
The first task for the bystander, then, would be to acknowledge reality. If the body politic bravely confronted the facts in our newspapers, it would soon be apparent that Americans suffer from being depressed, fragmented, megalomaniacal, delusional and immersed in denial. We are one nation of split realities: One fact in the newspaper--the 200,000 episodes of televised violence, let’s say--has one meaning for Arnold Schwarzenegger, an actor with made-up wounds in fake wars who supports real military aggression, and another for someone like Eddie the Loop, a dismembered veteran from a real war who now leads an unimaginable life under a Manhattan bridge. Whose reality is the authentic one? Either some of us are crazy, or there is no such thing as “the real world.” Or there is, but as the late physicist Frank Oppenheimer once said, “We don’t live in the real world. We live in a world we made up.”
Computer science would call these systems we make to fill that world--our economy, two-party politics, the military, sexual identities, race relations, religious practices--”virtual realities,” because they represent what is “true” for the people inside them. The term was coined to describe the dazzling technology now being used to train pilots and brain surgeons and other high-risk professionals without having to involve actual passengers or patients. By donning specially equipped helmets and gloves that produce the sights, sounds and feel of another reality, a trainee seated in a classroom can be lifted thousands of feet above sea level, exposed to high winds, mountain ranges, thunderstorms and lightning, maybe even taken through a crash landing. Game over, the pilot-to-be emerges with a lot of knowledge but without a scratch. Nobody dies.
The confusion and harm occur when these imagined realities are mistaken for the thing itself. When the political game we’d been playing for more than a decade crash-landed last November and we “came back to reality,” nobody was supposed to be hurt. Instead, suffering a terrible cognitive hangover after 12 years of political lies, we were tempted to fall back on the quick fix: Elect a new President who promised change and recovery in the first 100 days. Indeed, with a stroke of his pen on Day 1, Clinton removed all the harmful gags and abortion restrictions he could. Then, preparing to lift another ban on the body politic’s sexuality, he suddenly faced an angry Joint Chiefs of Staff, medals flashing, furious with him for messing up “military morale.” The President, cowed, subsequently compromised the rights of homosexuals by allowing them to serve in the military--but only in the closet.
“Don’t ask, don’t tell,” as this absurd policy is called, is the inevitable result of 40 long years of Cold War thinking, when secrecy and denial became entrenched cultural habits. The press accepted its exclusion from top secret meetings to protect “national security,” and private citizens were discouraged from questioning authority. Without words, without meaning, the Cold War seeped into the personal relationships of men and women, fathers and mothers, the psyches of young children. The baby-boom generation, including our new President, was permanently imprinted with the image of the mushroom cloud. Secret decisions made behind closed doors in Washington had a direct impact on my kindergarten finger-painting 2,000 miles away, as air-raid sirens drilled terror into my head.
The mushroom cloud provides a riveting clue to the etiology of my generation. After spending our school years crouched between the wooden runners of our desks, ears pounding and minds squeezing with dread that this could be it , we later latched onto the rungs of corporate ladders with a frenzied, irresponsible compulsion to “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow. . . .” Indulging the need for immediate gratification to historic excess, we entered the job market guided by the slogan appearing on T-shirts in the ‘80s: “Whoever dies with the most toys wins.” Reversing the political formula Walter Lippman proposed for national security and world peace after the devastating lessons of World War II--public interest first, private interest next--we instead plundered Wall Street with merger mania, created vast unemployment with hostile takeovers and polluted the environment with deregulation. These unrealities were accomplished under such amorphous explanations as “market forces,” “supply and demand” and “economic competitiveness,” as though our mortal economic arrangements were acts of God or scientific laws.
But for compassionate people to survive in a culture where raw suffering and the threat of violence are felt daily, our work had to be as “purged of feeling” as the previous generation’s. Although bystanders reeling from cultural traumas might find temporary relief in emotionally distancing themselves, this tactic eventually aggravates, rather than cures, a political depression. By default or by design, a bystander’s passive behavior during social crises can result in unchecked aggression.
As my friend, author Patricia O’Toole, wrote in a letter from the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill last year, after holding in her hand a bill of sale from a slave auction for 30 human beings, “the all-in-a-day’s-work quality of it is heart-stopping.” But hearts immersed in the virtual realities of fascism or slavery didn’t stop--though some may have skipped a few beats--because killing Jews and purchasing Africans had become “normal” behavior in the culture supporting them. And hearts immersed in today’s political realities no longer stop when Eddie the Loop, or any of the homeless windshield washers working the exit ramps in Manhattan, asks for a quarter. We’ve learned to look away.
PHILOSOPHER AND SOCIAL reformer Bertrand Russell once declared that, in case he met God, he would say to Him, “Sir, you did not give us enough information.” Vonnegut said he would add, “All the same, Sir, I’m not persuaded that we did the best we could with the information we had. Toward the end there, anyway, we had tons of information.”
Even before we knew the specific details of ruined world economies and environmental devastation that are being revealed today, as files and secret papers from the Cold War are opened up around the world, rumors abounded. We already “knew” the truth in general, unspoken terms.
How did we know? A crazed patient hospitalized in Oak Ridge, Tenn., cries out during nightmares and is “disappeared” from the ward. Karen Silkwood is killed in a car accident, and the briefcase of papers she had promised a reporter cannot be found. If the full details of the Iran-contra affair are ever disclosed, if the Nixon tapes are ever released from legal blockades at the National Archives, if the gag orders in the settlement of critical medical suits are ever lifted, we will not be surprised by the compromising secrets they contain. We already know and feel them. They show up in our cynicism about politics, our crime-ridden streets, our damning X-rays.
Certainly, future historians studying the arms race, global pollution, our immune-system dysfunctions and the whopping world debt will think it odd we didn’t “know” what was going on. Before any radioactive wastes can be dumped in our deserts and oceans, they must first pass through millions of minds: Secret plans have to be discussed, secret orders have to be issued, secret papers have to be typed, secret cargo has to be transported, secret destinations have to be reached. All this work must be done by people without anyone wondering, anywhere along the route to the North Pole, “Say, what’s in this stuff?”
As Robert Bellah and his colleagues point out in “The Good Society,” the homeless were not dropped on our streets by a deus ex machina ; they arrived through human actions and social choices: “the market-driven conversion of single-room-occupancy hotels into upscale tourist accommodations, government urban-renewal projects that revitalized downtowns while driving up rents and reducing housing for the poor, economic changes that eliminated unskilled jobs paying enough to support a family, the states’ ‘deinstitutionalization’ of the mentally ill and reduced funding of local community health programs.”
Each of these anonymous “systems” responsible for the despair today is composed of individual people. The homeless, the camp inmates of our cities, had to pass unnoticed through the thoughts of real estate brokers, economists, CEOs, human resource personnel, mental health experts, state legislators, county judges, voters and taxpayers, my friends, your friends, you and me, while none of us “knew” what we were doing.
Breaking the habits of secrecy and denial is no small chore. Author Deborah Tannen documents the many difficulties women and men have communicating their feelings to one another in “You Just Don’t Understand.” But what if this current communication disorder is not an inability to express our feelings? What if it’s simply that we can’t talk about what we’re doing? Every day there are stories, reported and not, of sexual harassment, race discrimination, pay inequity, social injustice. What if our speechlessness is another symptom of our political depression, a silent testimony that our work, our lives, have to be “purged of feeling” to carry on? The virtual reality we wanted nothing to do with has infected every fiber of our beings, every tendril of our psyches. How we talk. What we do in bed.
The bystanders who resolve to know the truth about who and what are behind our policies of “don’t ask, don’t tell” will face multiple problems, of course. It will be necessary to question traditions and loyalties that have passed for normal. Such critical thinking might have registered an objection to President George Bush’s comment after Anita Hill’s dramatic opening remarks last year, when reporters caught him on the White House lawn and asked for his reaction. He replied, almost contemptuously, “I didn’t even watch it.” He didn’t have to, he said, because nothing could alter his support for Clarence Thomas.
At the time, we knew this comment was supposed to inspire us to think, “What a loyal guy, standing by his man through ‘this whole ugly thing,’ ” as he called it. Had all of our cylinders been firing, we might have thought instead, “Wait a minute. Here we are glued to our TV sets, and the guy who appointed Clarence Thomas didn’t even watch?” Women in the audience might have heard this message: “It doesn’t matter if you lie or tell the truth. Make trouble for my man, I won’t even listen.”
Bush apparently didn’t know that “the whole ugly thing” involved an estimated 85% of all American women--and neither, for a moment, did we. In October, 1991, 37% of bystanders polled “believed Clarence Thomas” while 27% “believed Anita Hill.” About one year later, Newsweek polled us again, reporting in a December, 1992, article on sexual harassment in the workplace that a 51% majority now thinks Hill was telling the truth, while support for Thomas dropped to 34%. What happened in that intervening year that caused us to reject the facts and opinions manufactured by public relations and return to our own?
We talked. Anita Hill’s testimony provoked millions of private conversations in the body politic. We looked down into the “chasm of speechlessness” where we kept our secrets. Had we known these stories just one year earlier, Clarence Thomas might not be sitting on the Supreme Court today. This costly time lag is the result of our fragmentation, the time it takes to put the facts of our personal lives into the facts of public reality.
REFORMING A WHOLE CIVILIZATION is a daunting endeavor for a culture that likes to think in terms of one-minute managers and 12-step programs, a culture willing to pretend that an economy under military control for four long decades can be changed in a mere 100 days. Although becoming one-hour Samaritans at a soup kitchen or mini-philanthropists with our checkbooks can relieve some of the symptoms of our national malaise, the cure itself requires extensive internal effort, uprooting old lies and grafting new truths onto the way we think.
As Frederick Douglass warned the bystanders to slavery 130 years ago, “Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did. It never will.” How, then, can ordinary Americans “out there,” who serve as our cultural witnesses, make their demands felt? How can activist bystanders keep sending the message that we still want change, even though we know it’s scary for the Joint Chiefs to think about troops led by known homosexuals? Even though it’s unnerving for us to forfeit our innocence for the truth? If the body politic is to maintain a visible presence and start participating in non-virtual reality again, two essential tasks have to be accomplished first: to know , that is, to reconnect meaning to what we are witnessing, and to feel , to actively resist indifference.
The American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy is increasingly aware that political structures are directly responsible for much of the pathology clients are experiencing today. Its membership includes many therapists who recognize political systems that force individuals into conformist roles and dehumanizing lifestyles as a huge part of their clients’ suffering.
In “Women & Power,” Thelma Jean Goodrich redefines the goal of therapy as helping clients “gain whatever resources are necessary to remove oneself from a condition of oppression, to guarantee one’s ability to perform and to affect not only one’s own circumstances but also more general circumstances outside one’s intimate surroundings.” Goodrich says that recognition of a “social order that studies war, rewards competitiveness, restricts resources, promotes isolation and punishes those who are colored, female or poor” requires therapists to “stop using our sessions to fix up the people so the system works better and start fixing up the system so the people work better.” She questions the endeavor of working to help clients in therapy without also engaging in social activism.
The largest task of activist therapy would be to reconnect bystanders to the power of knowing “out loud.” Those of us conditioned to the quick fix, acclimated to the role of bystander, are going to have to become talkers in our communities, seers in our corporations. It was knowing and feeling aloud that led Danish bystanders 50 years ago to put the Star of David on their sleeves, offering protection for and solidarity with Jewish neighbors. It was fear of this same knowing that made the Israelis bring back 100 of the 400 deported Palestinians last winter, with promises to bring back the rest. Fear that Americans would waver in their support caused one Israeli official to remark how much harder it was to conduct cleansings with “everyone watching on CNN.” Exactly.
And it’s not just watching, it’s understanding what we are seeing, it’s comprehending how an event halfway around the world is linked to the folks in our own separate suburbs.
There will be myriad unpleasantries to face if we start treating our political depression by knowing out loud, of course. If we tell the truth about what’s passing for normal “out there,” the usual names are likely to be hauled out: strident and hysterical, anti-patriotic, godless humanists, special interest groups, “bleeding hearts” and “whistle blowers”--phrases usually uttered with contempt, designed to make us feel selfish or crazy. While questioning authority is an essential part of becoming an activist bystander, it’s much harder than seeing a shrink or having your colors done. It requires constant vigilance, because bystanders are not merely cultural witnesses; they are cultural watchdogs.
When the novelist Colette’s daughter complained about how hard it was to keep telling the truth in a culture embedded in mendacity, she wrote back, “Who said you should be happy? Do your work.”
