BY JOSH COHEN

In print | March 29, 2007

Last week, researchers at New York University announced a breakthrough in neurophysiology: they have succeeded in deleting frightening experiences from the memories of rats. The researchers artificially created anxiety in the rats and then rearranged the rats’ brains so that there was no longer any experience of the “anxiety attack.” It’s a scientific achievement; the details are beyond me. But experiments like this have consequences outside the laboratory that go frightfully unchallenged due to the average person’s outright submission to scientific authority. Too often these sorts of scientific discoveries are appropriated by the cultural project of Happiness, which seizes the scientific truth (or description) as prescription for the human condition.

But when scientists describe anxiety as the misfiring of this or that neuron, they’re doing so retrospectively; they’re providing a what, even a how, and yet they can’t say anything about who did what to you and why. So the prescription sounds a lot like self-help, but with the backing of hard science: “You are the way you are.” This is why it’s so scary that one of the researchers, Greg Quirk, said with regards to his team’s findings: “This is the future of psychiatry.”

In recent years, the study of psychiatry has been dominated by Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, a school of thought conceived by psychiatrist Aaron T. Beck in the 1960s in response to growing disillusionment with Freudian psychotherapy. Beck posited a new way of dealing with mental problems that abandoned dream theory and free association and all that literary stuff for a focus on behavior, habit and ready-made, easily digestible explanation. Basically, the therapy is predicated on training yourself to identify and eliminate bad habits and bad thinking by positive repeated avowals or rituals which aim to rearrange your brain so that it’s rewired, back to normal - so that you get fixed. It’s like wishing things away. And it’s conditioning; whether it is self or social- depends on how you view these things. CBT effectively adopted the mechanical view of man’s mind and exploited it to offer a therapy that was tangible, efficient and, most importantly, immediate.

CBT has seen increasing popularity since Beck offered it to the world at large, so much so that it informs the way the most of us think about ourselves — as biological machines — even if we’re not in therapy. The modern phenomena of over-diagnosis (GlaxoSmithKline says: 10-15 percent of Americans suffer from Restless Leg Syndrome) and prescription pills (44 million for sedative hypnotics alone last year, thanks to our generation’s unprecedented number of insomniacs) are the offspring of CBT. CBT is really the perfect business: It offers you a temporary, superficial healing that, because of the increasing anxiety borne of the self-awareness that everything buried and real remains untouched, has you frantically turning to other means, i.e., facelifts and how-to books. The obsession with superficial physical change is a consequence of talking about emotions superficially, as if they were just chemical reactions. And yet you can’t possibly be cured of a mental illness as if it were your common cold. It’s like Hamm has it in Beckett’s “Endgame”: “We’re on Earth. There’s no cure for that.”

There is something really appealing about the idea that we can fix ourselves. But it offers a false sense of self-empowerment; worse, the description of people in terms of their mental illnesses and hardwiring makes people transparent and understandable, i.e. easily dismissed and/or dealt with. Take parents, for example. Have you ever been to summer camp? It is truly a spectacle to see the many healthy shining lot of us lined up at the nurse’s cabin after lunch waiting for our plastic goodie bag of pills. Are we really so sick? Who says? Parents have

famously sought ways not to actually have to deal with their children: Once, they beat us up; now, they call us bipolar and depressive and send us to someone with a clipboard and checklists and pictures of things in nature. In the U.K.‘s Sunday Times the other week, the first line of an article under the headline, "WANT A FIGHT? SCIENTISTS SAY IT’S ALL IN YOUR GENES," read: “Scientists have discovered an answer to one of the most intractable squabbles in family life — argumentative children are born and not made.” That may be scientifically justified but it is irrelevant to the projects of parenting and growing up. I’m better off creating myself, however delusional, than sitting back and seeing what my crazy predetermined psyche will do to me next. In the same vein, I really wish people would stop saying they can’t do something because they’re depressed: you do something because you choose to. You get depressed afterwards. Depression is made-up. Though that doesn’t make it any less real, or painful.

I want battle scars, not surgery scars. I want beautiful losers, not fake winners. I want my worst memories. I don’t say this because life is suffering (though it is) or because you need to suffer to make art (though that is true, too). After all, romanticizing your life away is really not much of a life, either. The thing about the fundamentally scientific approach to human beings, though, is that it is completely anti-imagination. Imagine there are bugs crawling on your skin; imagine you hear voices in your head; imagine you see your grandmother’s ghost in the corner of your bedroom. Those imaginings are crazy-making indeed, but the way to deal with them is not to prescribe pills that will physically stop you from seeing those things — or to literally wipe them off your mental map — but to stare at your grandma’s ghost and talk it out with her, or someone saner, until you realize, Hey, I’m seeing things. That’s all me. To fight fire with fire: to use your imagination to overcome your imagination.

Why is it that personal “suffering” has somehow become polite table talk? “So, which antidepressant are you taking? Zoloft? I loooove Zoloft!” One possibility is that the creeping suspicion that both the pain and gain are bought and dependent on everyone else’s ability to tinker with your wiring results in that sort of constant need poseurs have to prove themselves to themselves. Pills are necessary, man; but they’re never anything more than complicated, expensive Advil.

It makes me think of Beckett again: “We are all born mad. Some remain so.” I don’t think Beckett would be opposed to antidepressants, but I think after downing his daily dose he’d turn to you or me and say: “Now what?” Moreover, he wouldn’t want us to mistake scientific achievement for personal progress. Nor would he want us to let commercial psychology have us forget that sane is a synonym for civilized. Our truest selves are absolutely raving. Thus, if in the future psychiatry is predicated on eliminating our madness, it will heal us only insofar as it will kill us.

Josh is a sophomore. You can reach him at jcohen2@swarthmore.edu.

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