BY C.A. CHASE

In print | Published October 30, 2008 — Updated November 03, 2008 09:30

Just in case you thought self-medication was on the outs, you might want to add a new facet to the concept of unironically listening to crap music/egregious and rather ghoulish abuse of household cleansers/sundry collegiate alcoholism; placebos! According to the New York Times, half of doctors surveyed regularly prescribe placebos to patients, and not just for psychosomatic ailments. This extends to the standard “psycho,” since a heavy percentage of physicians “reported using them for their effect on patients’ psyches, not their bodies.” In other words, American depression is not linked to anything interesting like class despair; we have the sort of unease that can be medicated away.

With sugar pills. The psychoanalytic days of yore with a cocaine-dabbling Freud have been replaced with Mary Poppins, and any creative or analytical benefits of depression aren’t applicable. Because we aren’t really depressed, we’re just so boring we can’t realize that we’re bored with ourselves.

The issue with this placebo-ization goes beyond the context of ethical dubiousness or even raising clichéd eyebrows at the size of the medicated multitudes. I mean, really, what’s the point of happiness if it’s piss-poor and you can’t buy it anyway? Look at medical insurance: pills are not cheap. The despair-inducing part of the placebo status quo is that much of our depression is piss-poor as well.

This isn’t that surprising, given the awful female yowling or pseudo-rock grimaces that populates the airwaves and how many turn to music to give structure to impulses they can’t understand.

This lack of understanding, of analysis, is antithetical to creative despair. Am I glamorizing depression? Yes, but if you’re dealing with mental problems that are conflated with issues lumped under the “human condition,” you might as well have the more interesting variety, no? The relentless analysis that lends itself to actually saying something real about the world becomes unhealthy when amplified in regard to the self. But we lack the side benefits of that sort of authenticity because we have the sort of unhappiness that can be cured by sedatives.

Is this indicative of a larger attempt to disavow ourselves of a larger sort of deep analysis? Obviously. There are set facts and observations about the world that you can draw on, and the rest is interpretation. That’s what “reading into things” is. It is unsurprising that if our emotional unrest shoddily falls far short of the existential self-poking, any cure would be shallow and shoddy as well.
Such mediocrity makes depression (if you can even call it that) a rather ill-felt out revenge on the world. Not even the world, some sort of ill-defined target that can be eliminated by pills that don’t screw around with your brain chemistry. Objections to things like heroin and ecstasy are (besides issues of fatality, the rise of communicable diseases, addiction, rising crime, etc.) primarily protests against feeling things that you normally would not feel, whether that be artificial despair or artificial joy, both of which work against you.

What else do sugar pills do but transport you back to the realm of what is teeth-gnashingly mundane? The weather outside is neither bright nor stormy; instead, it’s dull and drizzly and everyday. This may seem like a glorification of drugs, but it isn’t. If you need them to feel more than ordinary — that is, more than boring — you’d be likely to have the bland sugarized version of depression. Apparently, this is quite a lot of us: 30 to 40 percent of depressed patients show marked improvements when given placebos, the study suggests.

Is that sort of mental drizzle that much different from whatever watered-down version of teenage angst you experienced back in the day? In this attempt to homogenize already homogenized unhappiness, there are strains of an adolescent emo-ish attempt at control. If I have any problems with doctors prescribing placebos for fourth-rate types of unease, it is that this sort of prescription allows people to assert ownership of a crumminess that isn’t original in its crumminess at all.

Because what is unhappiness without self-analysis? Constant picking at the world and at yourself is a distortion, sure, but within that distortion is a mechanism for seeing things as they are that healthy people have learned to put aside in their personal lives in order to function. You have to learn to deal with critiquing things in order to live in a thoughtful, healthy (ish) way.

What does it mean, then, when the unceasing self-critique that marks both depressed and insightful minds can be sugarcoated away? Was it ever that profound to begin with? If the “depressed” mindset is the deepest or most critical way to view the world, and we lack that, then what? We lack a flotation device in a sea of indifference, in a world that values boredom of the worst possible kind, that is, when the false reality of reality TV somehow is more interesting than the world around us. If this is the best you can hope for, then God help you if you ever read Hamlet. Or watch the news.

C.A. Chase is a sophomore. She can be reached at cchase1@swarthmore.edu.

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