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Tuesday, May 11, 2004
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HARRIED RAMA
It’s a tired subject, I know, but remember Chronic Fatigue Syndrome? It was le desordre du jour a few years ago, claiming the purposiveness and joie de vivre of hundreds of thousands of yuppies from the redwood mountains to the gulf stream waters, until its inability to produce an etiology for itself put it to sleep for good. To be sure, a few perimenopausal party poopers still drag themselves around telling anyone who’ll listen they’ve got CFS; but you haven’t read a thing about it in years, have you? It’s one more past-its-prime pathology-craze. Yet the cultural unease out of which CFS was confected remains. The sense that Americans are working themselves ragged and fucking up their personal lives but good just so they can buy stuff is in fact more acute now than it was when CFS was riding high. University Diaries likes to keep an eye out for professors who are thinking seriously about this important trend, and professors who are not. Under not, there’s Professor David M. Levy of the University of Washington, who says that we need to protect our “psychic space” and “quiet time” in a world choking on “information overload.” To that end, he has introduced into his life plenty of non-screen and non-phone meditative breaks, as he should. End of story. Not. The man after all is an American, which means he’s gotta market this. Instead of relaxing with his new-found wisdom, Levy’s gone bigtime, hitting up the foundations and organizing a three-day conference (“Information, Silence and Sanctuary“ is the pretentious title) which will, it says here (Washington Post, Monday),“diagnose and prescribe treatment for what is ailing Levy - and, in his view, most of the developed world.” Well, if that’s all! I mean, baby, if you’re planning on curing most of the developed world, that’s gotta cut into your mantras. Barbara Ehrenreich, on the other hand, has the right idea. In a review in last Sunday’s New York Times of a book about a typical screwed-up upper-middle-class American family, she writes that the horrible psychological disorders of the overworked author’s teenage children seem to have a good deal to do with the author himself, who is seldom fully present to be a loving father to them. Noting first the wise cynicism of American high school kids in regard to the bogus over-diagnosing of the psychology crowd (the diagnosis “bipolar disorder” is now, Ehrenreich notes, “so wildly faddish it’s become a casual term of high school invective”), Ehrenreich concludes her review in this way: Why is [the book’s author] moonlighting anyway? So they can afford the pricey suburb where he ''desperately'' wanted to live because of its high-quality -- read: high-pressure -- public schools. Thus each generation is condemned to scramble along on its own treadmill, with the gears of family life making murderously tight connections between the two. Throughout his ordeal, [the author] clings to the notion that mental illness is biologically based -- meaning accompanied and sometimes caused by physical changes in the brain -- and of course it is. But this does not mean that we are born with our psychoses, only with the potential to develop them. Furthermore, the causality works both ways. Not only can physical conditions in the brain predispose us to aberrant behavior, but subjectively experienced states, of stress or rejection, for example, can alter the chemistry of the brain. So when huge and growing numbers of affluent young people start displaying the kinds of behavior labeled A.D.D., depression and bipolar disorder, it may be time to stop talking about brain chemistry, or even family pathology, and start looking for ''something in the water'' -- in this case, broad social causes. Could there be an incoherent rebellion under way against the relentless pressure to achieve, which kicks in now at the preschool stage? It may be a clue that the symptoms of many childhood psychiatric disorders seem to preclude schoolwork and attendance. Maybe the only problem with the kids is that they have been watching their own high-achieving parents, and they have seen where all that leads. |