Last night I was checking through the links to various and sundry articles from my Google Alerts. It's interesting to watch certain topics work their way through various media over time -- I think I saw the report of the efficacy of telephone therapy with depressed patients close to a month ago but it pops up still in some new outlet as the idea moves through various outlets. I work with a number of my patients on the telephone and have for several years -- yes, it does work. They could have just asked me.
Anyway, while following links last night, I ran across this interesting piece in the Swathmore College student newspaper. I am used to finding great enthusiasm for the brave new world of neuroscience and the like from younger people, especially since the mind-oriented approaches to psychology -- those of us who focus on meaning rather than symptom relief -- are decreasingly part of academic psychology. So it was refreshing to read Josh Cohen's article about his reaction to this research:
"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...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.”
Then --
"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."
Yes, some of that comes of the earnestness of a college sophomore still in the throes of discovering who he is and what life is about. But he strikes a note of deeper truth when he gets that suffering, to a degree, is in fact a part of life and is not without meaning. Jung teaches us that suffering cannot be escaped, or not without peril, and must be embraced and accepted as part of the human condition.
Josh will refine his thinking as he gets older but he is making a good start and it is encouraging to see among the young a voice that challenges the existing dogma about mental health.