Malignant Sadness by Lewis Wolpert, Faber & Faber, 拢9.99, ISBN 057119172X
WHEN the biologist Lewis Wolpert recovered from a severe depression, he wrote about his despair and obsession with suicide in The Guardian. Huge response: readers praised his courage. In Blair鈥檚 cool cut-throat Britannia-first commandment Thou Shalt Market Thyself-it takes guts to admit you are depressed and devote a whole book to it. Malignant Sadness (ISBN 057119172X) is courageous, thorough and sincere but I鈥檓 afraid it depressed me a bit. This is right and proper. We should be depressed about depression. The WHO claims that one person in six suffers from it and the numbers are growing. By 2050, we鈥檒l all be completely depressed.
This appears to be news to the authors of Next, a pot of guesses about the future (HarperCollins, 拢14.99, ISBN 0002570416). Depression has no place in Ira Matathia and Marian Salzman鈥檚 upbeat 鈥渧ision of our future lives鈥�. They mention depression just once: picky parents will use CAT scans to discover whether their babies will be depressed.
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Bizarrely, Next ignores the cultural trends that allow us to be open and tell the world our woes-even in once-uptight WASP cultures. I鈥檇 love to know how many PhDs are being written about television shows like the series Jerry Springer hosts and emotional exhibitionism in general.
But some of Next鈥檚 predictions are truly depressing. The future is more mainstream erotica and Puritan backlash, more 鈥渉ot desking鈥�-smaller and smaller workspaces shared by many workers on a rotating basis-more virtual-reality holidays.
Next may be interesting about the future but it hasn鈥檛 grasped just what an industry psychobusiness has become. There are more than a million therapists in the West now. Why? Is it because people seek reassurance and want answers in a confusing world? And might that be linked to the rise of depression?
In our confessional culture, we don鈥檛 just want to know that Wolpert felt suicidal: we want chapter, verse and razor blade on how many attempts, where, how near. Instead of providing the Oprah-esque, Wolpert just says he felt awful, couldn鈥檛 work, went into hospital-and, rather suddenly, crisis over. Our man鈥檚 jogging again to get the endorphins going.
Wolpert explores the history of depression, its nature, its causes, who suffers, the brain processes, and what helps. He is lucid and balances the evidence well, but all this could have been written by a gifted reporter with no personal experience. Only on the first page does Wolpert show some emotion.
鈥淚t was the worst experience of my life. More terrible even than watching my wife die of cancer. I am ashamed to admit that my depression felt worse than her death but it is true. I was in a state that bears no resemblance to anything I had experienced before.鈥� That aside, the sharpest feelings come from the poets Wolpert quotes. Anne Sexton鈥檚 devastating The Sickness Unto Death gets you inside really black despair:
God went out of me
as if the sea dried up like sandpaper
as if the sun became a latrine
God went out of my fingers.
They became stone.
None of the biological and psychological theories that Wolpert describes is as convincing as Sexton鈥檚 poem. Could poor parenting and childhood stress cause depression? Perhaps. Rats which are licked more by their mums seem more stable in later life. Heredity almost certainly has something to do with it, but how? We can鈥檛 pin down the agents with much certainty.
We still know little about the precise brain processes involved, Wolpert admits. Neurotransmitters are involved, of course, but the cause and effect relations are complex. If depression is caused by too little serotonin, why does it take three weeks for anti-depressants to work when the serotonin level rises after a few hours?
Wolpert was helped by cognitive therapy and so he鈥檚 not ironic about what seems like a prescription to 鈥渢hink better thoughts鈥�. Cognitive therapy claims you鈥檙e depressed because you feel you鈥檙e a loser and losers never see anything straight. So move over Freud, let鈥檚 accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. Does it work? Try it.
I鈥檝e just had my paper rejected by Nature, I鈥檓 a zero psychologist, I drink too much, my wife thinks I鈥檓 lousy in bed, I might as well die. The cognitive 鈥渃ure鈥� tells you to be positive. Nature rejected your paper: try another journal. Try making love to your wife when you鈥檙e not drunk. Or have an affair with a bimbo. Living well in the best revenge. Cognitive therapists get paid for these pearls so they must never get depressed.
Wolpert can鈥檛 say why a third of depressives get better even if they get no treatment and, for a biologist, he is surprisingly kind to therapy. He thinks it works nearly as well as drugs.
I had better confess myself. I don鈥檛 warm to Wolpert鈥檚 restraint. I compare it with the late Stuart Sutherland, a sociology professor at Sussex, giving a rollicking account of his manic depression in Breakdown (reissued in 1998 by OUP). He accused Freudians of fraud and his wife of infidelity, but he couldn鈥檛 take her seriously because she was screwing an accountant. Then he found out it was a friend. Total despair.
Sutherland admits he often dictated letters to his secretary while sitting on the loo. He assumed all professors in the better universities did that.
No such gems from Wolpert. He thought an adverse reaction to a cardiac drug caused his depression. His wife thought it might be more psychological, possibly linked with having to visit South Africa where his father had been murdered.
Then we learn that the drug Resperine turned Wolpert鈥檚 father into a depressive shadow of his former self. I鈥檓 sorry if this sounds callous, but you can鈥檛 really drop murders and a depressed dad into a semi-confessional book, say nothing more-and not expect people to complain of feeling cheated.
Wolpert is a chronic hypochondriac. But he doesn鈥檛 ask why or ask whether it might be linked to his depression. The book remains expert but not moving. That鈥檚 a rather ungenerous verdict but, somehow, I don鈥檛 think one can write a personal book about depression and leave so much that is personal out.