9781408878729

The social sciences are where you apply the scientific method not to what’s happening in

a test tube or a particle collider, but to how you and I live every day—to social life.

In that moment, I finally understood for the first time why—throughout this

journey—I kept thinking about that day when I got terribly sick in rural

Vietnam. When I yelled for drugs to stop my worst symptom—the extreme

room-spinning nausea—the doctor told me: “You need your nausea. It is a

message, and we must listen to the message. It will tell us what is wrong

with you.” If I had ignored or silenced that symptom, my kidneys would

have failed, and I would have died.

You need your nausea. You need your pain. It is a message, and we must

listen to the message. All these depressed and anxious people, all over the

world—they are giving us a message. They are telling us something has

gone wrong with the way we live. We need to stop trying to muffle or

silence or pathologize that pain. Instead, we need to listen to it, and honor

it. It is only when we listen to our pain that we can follow it back to its

source—and only there, when we can see its true causes, can we begin to

overcome it.

grieve because we have loved.

We grieve because the person we have lost mattered to us. To say that grief

should disappear on a neat timetable is an insult to the love we have felt.

Deep grief and depression, she explained to me, have identical

symptoms for a reason. Depression, I realized, is itself a form of grief—for

all the connections we need, but don’t have.

And now I realized—just like it is an insult to Joanne to say that her

ongoing grief for her daughter is a form of mental dysfunction, it was an

insult to my teenage self to say that his pain was just the result of bad brain

chemistry. It was an insult to what he had been through, and to what he

needed.

So instead of seeing your depression and anxiety as a form of madness, I

would tell my younger self—you need to see the sanity in this sadness. You

need to see that it makes sense. Of course it is excruciating. I will always

dread that pain returning, every day of my life. But that doesn’t mean the

pain is insane, or irrational. If you touch your hand to a burning stove, that,

too, will be agony, and you will snatch your hand away as quickly as

possible. That’s a sane response. If you kept your hand on the stove, it

and burn until it was destroyed.

It’s a signal, saying—you shouldn’t have to live this way

When I was a

child, Margaret Thatcher said, “There’s no such thing as society, only

individuals and their families”—and, all over the world, her viewpoint won.

We believed it—even those of us who thought we rejected it. I know this

now, because I can see that when I became depressed, it didn’t even occur

to me, for thirteen years, to relate my distress to the world around me. I

thought it was all about me, and my head. I had entirely privatized my pain

—and so had everyone I knew.

Because you are being told depression and anxiety are misfirings of brain

chemicals, you will stop looking for answers in your life and your psyche

and your environment and how you might change them. You will become

sealed off in a serotonin storyYou will try to get rid of the depressed

feelings in your head. But that won’t work unless you get rid of the causes

of the depressed feelings in your life.

No, I would say to my younger self—your distress is not a malfunction.

It is a signal—a necessary signal.

I know this is going to be hard to hear, I’d tell him, because I know how

deep your suffering cuts. But this pain isn’t your enemy, however much it

hurts (and Jesus, I know how much it hurts). It’s your ally—leading you

away from a wasted life and pointing the way toward a more fulfilling one.

Your biology can make your distress worse, for sure.

But it’s not the cause.

When I ask people—‘What would

you [personally] do with a basic income?’ about 99 percent of people say

—‘I have dreams, I have ambitions, I’m going to do something ambitious

and useful.’ ” But when he asks them what they think other people would

do with a basic income, they say—oh, they’ll become lifeless zombies,

they’ll binge-watch Netflix all day.

There is evidence—from other scientific studies—that

shame makes people sick. For example, closeted gay men, during the AIDS

crisis, died on average two to three years than openly gay men, even

when they got health care at the same point in their illness. Sealing off a

part of yourself and thinking it’s disgusting poisons your life.