The Danger of Almost-Truth

I recently watched Brene Brown's TED talk entitled "the power of vulnerability". She details the pervasive feelings of shame, guilt, perfectionism and comfort-seeking that she has recognized through her research within society. Symptoms of these epidemics include the most indebted, obese, drug addicted and psychiatric drugged adult population in American history. I haven't yet been able to connect the teachings from the Archetypal Dream therapy that I engage in to any popular psychologist. Her talk was the closest thing I've gotten to that yet.

In it, she explains the connection between shame and perfectionism. She argues that people should 'lean in' to difficult feelings of shame, pain, and fear in order to really experience joy and gratitude. She talks about how the key to accessing these feelings is to allow ourselves to be vulnerable and to embrace ourselves as we are. In a lot of ways, these insights connect well to many of the conclusions I've drawn from the Dreamwork.

But there is also something about doing dreamwork that makes one skeptical. It is the ego that wants a quick fix, that wants to feel immediately enlightened by someone's words, immediately convinced to follow a certain life's path. It's something deeper that realizes we have been tricked by an 'easy' truth before.

It was all over for me and Brown when I got to her website and noticed that one of her pages included a "Favorites" page. Yes, the emotional guru herself, who recommends the book "Can't Buy Me Love: How Advertising Changes You" as a book that changed her life, has a whole page dedicated to some of her favorite things--mostly books, but also cameras, kitchen accessories, which she admits that she gets commission on. Don't worry--the commission she makes goes back to the reader in the form of 'giveaways' on the blog. Brown promotes her blog by promoting products and using that money to lure people into reading the blog.

Why does this matter? Well, for one thing, at this point, any product promotion whatsoever makes me suspicious of that person as a source of information, no matter what the circumstances. I know that sounds harsh and radical. But advertising, at this stage, is such a perversion of its originally intended purpose--(was SHOCKED today to see that one popular advertising company's slogan was "loyalty beyond reason", bragging about the fact that they manipulate people's desire to the point where they will buy the product even when it is not reasonable to do so)--and its success has contributed to so many terrible things--environmental catastrophe, human exploitation, wars, disease and mental illness within society---that I don't feel like treading lightly around it any longer.

In fact, I think it is precisely this type of advertising philosophy that has shown corporations how to transform individuals, creative, unique, and flawed individuals into a society of people who only know how to consume and chase after ways to make themselves more like everybody else.

Brown hints at this explanation from time to time, criticizing reality television, telling people not to watch it. But she doesn't take the necessary step to wake people up to the real problem. Brown never asks, as far as I can tell, where is all this shame coming from? Why are people so obsessed with success and recognition at the expense of their own joy?

These aren't easy questions. But I'm going to go out on a limb and say that they have societal answers, cultural answers, and thus political and economic answers. It's not enough for Brown to just tell us what the problem is, and recommend that we stop feeling that way. In fact, this is dangerous. Because it lures those with an intellectual interest in with an accurate diagnosis of the problem. But it does not go the necessary extra step of trying to analyze why things came to be this way. This allows intellectual interest to be pacified without that person having to go much deeper into the role they play in this society that makes people feel, a lot of the time, terrible.

This is also the problem I have with Jon Stewart. He so accurately pinpoints, hilariously, what is wrong with the media today. But he never so much as breathes a word of suggestion that the problems of this media have something to do with the fact that 6 multi billion dollar corporations own the vast majority of media outlets in the nation. This is dangerous. Because it makes people feel that by listening to Jon Stewart, they are doing something to combat the problems of corporate media. But Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! and the Prometheus Radio Project  are actual examples of what this fight looks like. Why won't Jon Stewart trumpet their causes, if he is so concerned with media corruption?

In the same way, Brene Brown is dangerous. Because she is diagnosing a very real problem in american society---that the adult population of America is shameful, addicted and self medicating. But she is not explaining how we got there. I believe it is because these explanations would be so uncomfortable to many well educated, upper middle class to upper class people whose livelihoods are deeply intertwined with the laws that make capitalism function---recognition by others is essential, winning feels good, having power makes you free, your value is dependent upon what you can produce. So uncomfortable, that people would not buy Brene Brown's books, they would not attend her lectures. And this would make her feel unrecognized, like a loser, powerless, pointless and all on down the chain. So she settles for the almost-truth, and nothing really changes.

Getting Over Yourself

I think one of the hardest thing to do in life is get over yourself, the more I think about all the different things this phrase could mean.

For a long time, I considered it a way to explain what haughty or stuck up people ought to do. Get over themselves. Realize that they are like every body else. If you were self-involved, I thought, you should get over yourself. Open up your eyes and realize what is actually important, relevant, etc.

For the past five years, until March, I had not been in a committed relationship. During this single period, all of my most nagging insecurities, about my weight, my attractiveness level, my craziness, my ability to achieve my goals were externalized on to this future person, my boyfriend. This imaginary man would know the exact ways to act and the exact things to say that would reassure me I was perfect and beautiful and lovable, and would soar me into a lifetime of success.

Then, in March, I started dating my boyfriend. And he didn't say or do any of those things. One night I pressed him for about an hour about my attractiveness and his first reaction was just, "Is this one of those weird girl things?". He did not even nibble at any of my bait, just wondered why in the world his girlfriend, who he would obviously choose because he thought she was attractive, would not think so. He tried his best to reassure me, but I realized that there was nothing he could say that would. The words, the actions, the feeling that I had been waiting for was never going to come from some outside source. After all, I will never see myself from anyone else's perspective but my own. Nor should I. If I did I would no longer be myself. And so, I realized that these insecurities were something that I had to get over myself. If I wanted to feel the way I had fantasized about, I would have to learn how to forgive myself, how to support myself, and how to be myself without waiting for any external validation from others.

In many ways this process has been very difficult. It seemed obvious to me that insecurities are obstacles that you place in front of your growth. But what has surprised me is what else they stand in the way of: your deeper, more subconscious fears. Yes I am insecure about my attractiveness: but even scarier, if I just felt beautiful because I am a woman, and all women are beautiful (as this guy said...or Eve Ensler here) . Then, beauty would no longer be a goal I would have to attain, clothing I could wear or a diet I could go on to feel reassured, superior to others. So then what would fulfill me? What would validate me? Yes I am insecure about people liking me: but even scarier, if I no longer cared what people think? Then who would I be? How would I act? What would I care about? Yes I am insecure that I'm not living up to my 'potential', not treading the path to success that was laid out for me in the Ivy League: but even scarier, to realize I don't even know what I would consider actual success without these society-imposed measures? That I basically need to start from scratch to determine what is actually important to me, this time as myself, not as a reflection of what I think others want me to be.

And thus, to what I see as the last meaning of this phrase. Realizing that 'yourself' in getting over yourself, isn't actually you at all. It's someone you have constructed out of others interpretations, someone that strives to meet expectations, paints convenient, safe narratives about your past and your future, helps you to cling to your bitterness, to make assumptions about who's better and who's worse, about what's important and what's not, all along pushing down farther and farther who you actually are.

So, onward to get over my self. It becomes more and more frightening the more successful I am. But I'm beginning to see that it is not the fear itself but our reactions to it, our avoidance of it, that prevents us from change, hardens us, and makes us hateful. Being uncomfortable does not always mean something is wrong. It could simply mean that you are beginning to grow.

**Many thanks to Marc Bregman, without whom I never would have gotten where I am right now**

So What if Anti-Depressants are Placebos?

In the two months since Sharon Begley's controversial article in Newsweek, "Why Anti-Depressants are No Better than Placebos", there have been a slew of articles and books out debating the issue: doctors fighting her conclusions, patients fighting back, Irving Kirsch's exploration into the drug's reality and Gary Greenberg's equally interesting exploration of the industry surrounding these anti-depressants. In her article, Begley presents the argument that anti-depressants are little more than placebos. I think the arguments are pretty persuasive. That's because it makes a lot of sense that mental illnesses are especially susceptible to placebo effects--after all, depression is an illness of thinking, and placebos change the way one thinks about your illness.

One reason I think people are so resistant to this idea is because it challenges their assumptions about the division between body and mind*** when it comes to health. By focusing solely on the physical body as the source of all illness and thus healing, modern western medicine has rejected the power of the mind to heal OR be the source of illness. Paradoxically, I think this focus has benefitted individuals who suffer from mental illnesses like depression. But I think if Begley is right, and most anti-depressants work in a placebo manner, we should really re-think our assumptions about the mind's role in our physical illnesses.

When a patient presents with symptoms of heart disease, a doctor naturally attempts to treat the heart. This is because heart disease is an umbrella term for a whole host of problems associated with the heart. Since we are currently ignorant of the precise physical manifestations that cause depression, its more properly described as a disease of the way a person is thinking or feeling that causes them to feel predominately sad, empty, lethargic, lonely, apathetic, etc. So, naturally, when someone presents with depressed symptoms, the doctor wishes to treat the person's thoughts and feelings. Anti-depressants do exactly this. They give a person a tangible way to think and feel healthier about their depression. First, they physicalizes the symptoms of the illness, separating the individual from their depressed symptoms. Like a bad case of the measles, or even a cancer, depression becomes something that can be fought with physical manifestations like medicine. Further, they remind individuals that they are not alone in their sadness, that there is hope for them, and that they are doing something productive to help their problem. And for 75% of people, this treatment, this physicalization of their thoughts and feelings really helps them, and they are able to improve their depression.

This description does not deny that depression is caused by something physical within our brains--far from it. What I'm suggesting is it's precisely because we emphasize depression's physical dimension, and probably treat it in some way that we are unaware of currently that we give individuals a better chance at defeating its mental symptoms. But, if we admit this to be the case, then it becomes a lot more difficult for us to deny the converse of this conclusion: that if we emphasized heart disease's mental dimension we would give people a better chance at defeating its physical symptoms. I don't know for certain whether this would help people or not, simply because the research hasn't been done--(and it's debatable whether scientific research could be done, since the hypothesis seems to be questioning the scientific method). But I do think that these are assumptions that are implicit in our modern understanding of depression are the reason why Begley's article caused so much controversy. And yet, the facts remain that these drugs have helped a lot of people feel a lot better (to table the issue of over-prescription, which I think is valid). So, I think the public revelation that anti-depressants are primarily placebos should be taken as a general wake-up call for our one-dimensional view of illness in general.

***Caveat here: I'm not trying to argue here for a dualist view. When I make the distinction between mind/body, I mean to the extent that anyone distinguishes between mental/physical illnesses: that there is physical cause for the mental ailments, but the causes are so far from our current neurological understanding that the distinction still makes practical sense.

Continuing on the Free Will/Science, from Dana Foundation Blog

November 09, 2009
Genes and criminals: Italian court makes controversial ruling

“Don’t blame me—it was my genes’ fault.” Could this be the plea of future criminals? In Italy, the case of a man who confessed to murder in 2007 may set a precedent.

It’s not that unusual that an Italian court gave Abdelmalek Bayout three years less than it otherwise would have because his lawyer argued Bayout was mentally ill at the time of the crime. What is unprecedented, though, is that at an appeal hearing in September the judge removed an additional year from the defendant’s sentence based on genetic tests. The judge believed Bayout’s genes made him “particularly aggressive in stressful situations,” basing his decision on the tests that revealed Bayout to have low levels of MAOA, a trait which has been linked to criminal behavior.

It was the first time in a European court that behavioral genetics has affected a sentence. In the United States, this type of defense has been used more than 200 times in the past five years and in rare cases has influenced sentencing.

“There’s increasing evidence that some genes together with a particular environmental insult may predispose people to certain behavior,” Pietro Pietrini, a molecular neuroscientist at Italy’s University of Pisa and one of the researchers investigating Bayout’s genetic makeup, said in a Nature news article.

Many people argue that this is true for anyone. It’s certainly a worthwhile question: Isn’t anyone who commits murder at least a little bit mentally ill? While this particular criminal’s sentence was reduced, others have argued that courts could rule the other way—if the person’s genes are “bad,” perhaps the sentencing should be stricter.

Many researchers contacted by Nature also questioned the court’s decisions. Giuseppe Novelli, a forensic scientist and geneticist, said that tests for single genes are “useless.” The judge may not have considered some additional relevant factors when analyzing the results, according to geneticist Terrie Moffitt.

It’s an interesting debate and likely one with too many factors to be settled any time soon.

—Andrew Kahn