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Randolph Nesse, director of the evolution and human adaptation program at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, believes that there are more kinds of depression than the diagnosticians have identified. Some depression may be a useful, adaptive response to situations in which a desired goal is unattainable.
“If I had to put my position in a nutshell,” Nesse has explained, “I’d say that mood exists to regulate investment strategies, so that we spend more time on things that work and less
time on things that don’t work.”
Many Americans use antidepressants to pull them back to “normal,” but this may be precisely the wrong response. If, as Nesse and others theorized, depression is a defensive response, one that tells us something important about ourselves or our culture, it makes no sense to clip its alarm wires with drugs.
Enter the young, urban, modern, fabulously “successful” Americans who are nonetheless disconnected from things they, at the most profound level, want: nature, intimacy, a quiet, unmediated environment. There’s nowhere they can immediately go to find these things. The desired goal seems unattainable. So depression sets in as the organism adapts to the problem, searching for a way out. Searching for meaning.
Austrian psychiatrist Victor Frankl, who died in 1997, believed that there is an existential dimension to much mental illness -- as distinct from, but sometimes in addition to, psychic or social or physical dimensions.
Specifically, he identified people caught in what he called the “existential vacuum.” It’s not a mental affliction, but a spiritual one: Your life seems utterly devoid of purpose. No path beckons. Eventually, a kind of paralytic cynicism sets in. You believe in nothing. You accept nothing as truthful, useful, or significant. You don’t value anything you’re currently doing and can’t imagine doing anything of value in the future.
Frankl believed that the existential vacuum he described was a modern condition. Carl Jung identified it in about a third of his patients, and he and his contemporaries noted that it was different from any neuroses they had seen before.
We pump for meaning. We hope to find it in malls. As Daniel Boorstin, retired Librarian of Congress, has pointed out, Americans shop not to get what they want (as Europeans, say, do) but to discover what they want. This may tie into modernity’s new, heroic explanation about the meaning of life, which has swept aside older spiritual teachings and cosmologies. We now place our faith in a grand narrative of consumer choice, of never-ending economic growth and technological progress. But this largely excludes the spiritual dimension of human existence.
-- Kalle Lasn and Bruce Grierson, “America the Blue,” reprinted in the
Utne Reader
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