Chemistry is often called on to heal the rift between body and soul. The relief that people that people express when a doctor says their depression is "chemical" is predicated on a belief that there is an integral self that exists across time, and on a fictional divide between the fully occasioned sorrow and the utterly random one. The word chemical seems to assuage people of the feeling of responsibility for the stressed-out discontent of not liking their jobs, worrying about getting old, failing at love, hating their families. There is a pleasant freedom from guilt that has been attached to chemical. If your brain is predisposed to depression, you need not blame yourself for it. Well, blame yourself or evolution, but remember that blame itself can be understood as a chemical process, and that happiness too, is chemical. Chemistry and biology are not matters that impinge on the "real" self; depression cannot be separated from the person it affects. Treatment does not alleviate a disruption of identity, bring you back to some kind of normality; it readjusts a multifarious identity, changing in some small degree who you are.
--Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
No comments:
Post a Comment