Shut Down Strategy + Wake-Up Call

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Bruce E. Levine is a practicing clinical psychologist since 1985. He believes a key to understanding depression is simple common sense — something he feels is often lost in professional training. "Depression is simply one of many human 'strategies' to shut down overwhelming pain," says Levine. "The price paid for the long-term reliance on depression is that it also shuts down energy, enthusiasm, sexual desire, concentration, memory and other cognitive skills, and can lead to guilt, hopelessness, problems in sleeping and eating, immobilization and thoughts of suicide."

"When we habitually employ a shutdown strategy — rather than healing and resolving the source of pain — we develop a tolerance to that strategy, which means that we need increasingly larger doses of it. Shutdown strategies such as depressions, alcohol, or other psychotropic drugs can create a vicious cycle in which the very strategy used to shut down pain can create more pain."

Many studies show a variety of psychological and interpersonal losses and pains that can lead to depression. In his book, The Truth About Depression, the physician Charles Whitfield reports on more than 200 studies which show that people who have suffered neglect, abuse and other types of trauma have a much greater risk of becoming depressed.

The loss of affection in a marriage is also highly associated with depression. In their book, The Interactional Nature of Depression, psychologists Thomas Joiner and James Coyne report that in one study of unhappily married women who were diagnosed with depression, 70 per cent of these women believed that the loss of marital satisfaction preceded their depression and 60 per cent believed that their unhappy marriage was the primary cause of their depression.

It is a similar story with postpartum depression, which occurs in 10 to 20 percent of women in the United Kingdom and the United States, but is considered rare in China, Fiji, and some African populations. A raft of studies has found that lack of social support after giving birth — a fundamental human need, often unacknowledged and unmet in Modern Western society, with its emphasis on individualism rather than family and community — results in emotional pain followed by depression.

"Low levels of social support directly predict depression," states the sociologist Robert Putnam. In his book, Bowling Alone, which details the collapse of community in the United States, Putnam reports, "Countless studies document the link between society and psyche: people who have close friends and confidants, friendly neighbors and supportive co-workers, are less likely to experience sadness, loneliness, low self-esteem and problems with eating and sleeping. The single most common finding from a half-century's research on correlates of life satisfaction, not only in the United States but around the world, is that happiness is best predicted by the breadth and depth of one's social connections."

An illustration of this can be seen in Mexican-Americans born in the United States, who are almost three times as likely to have had a 'major depressive episode' than recent Mexican immigrants to the United States or Mexicans remaining in Mexico, according to researcher and professor of public health William Vega. Vega found that Mexican immigrants' rate of mental disorders grew steadily after immigration, so much so that Mexican immigrants who had been in the United States for more than 13 years had nearly the same rate of mental disorders as native-born Americans.

"Mexicans tend to come from a much more integrated family system and," Vega concludes, "this translates into tremendous benefits of that in terms of everyday psychological resilience. They are much more likely to be in a situation where people help each other out — there is a cost for this greater personal and economic freedom. The cost is loss of reciprocal support."

In 1957, economist Leopold Kohr concluded in his book, The Breakdown of Nations, that misery in society could be explained by a single theory of size. "It suggests," says Kohr, "that there seems only one cause behind all forms of social misery: bigness."

In a society that has become increasingly institutionalized,
many people feel isolated, small, angry and scared.

"The faith of mass society," continues Levine, "that salvation will come through technology, compounds the problem. Once one accepts that our society worships machines and technology more than it does life and biodiversity, then it's easy to understand that the goal of society is to become more machine-like, more standardized. As society focuses on that goal, more and more people simply don't fit in. Psychiatry can compound this problem when, instead of concluding that there is a problem with this machine-worshipping culture, it concludes that there is a problem with the individual who does not fit in."

"Technology is also about control, and the more we singularly worship technology, the more we singularly worship control. Human beings pay a psychological price for any technology that controls them more than they control it — they can actually feel more powerless. Beyond its attribute of control, technology has no meaning, and if people singularly worship it, they will have meaningless lives."

The main emotion of the adult American
who has had all the advantages of wealth,
education and culture is disappointment.
John Cheever

In the 1960s and 1970s, the counter-culture's message of 'Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out', was about a 'collective consciousness', of looking at the world's sustainability challenges with a different type of psychotropic. 'Dropping acid' (LSD) and smoking marijuana was usually done in group settings, and sharing insights and deep Earth wisdom together and talking about alternatives and action. These drugs were not about 'action', they were about stopping the action, and having some reflection on life's problems and seeking a counter-solution to consumerism and rampant devastation of the environment.

The 1980s and 1990s drugs, anti-depressants and anxiety-lowering pharmaceuticals, offered the promise of individualized solutions to our problems, at a time when Americans were giving up on collective solutions to social difficulties and environmental devastation. The era of governmental or societal solutions to national problems and challenges, such as Social Security, the GI Bill and the Space Program, effectively died with Ronald Reagan's presidency. The '80s birthed a renewal of the old American myth of rugged individualism — Reagan on his horse, Oliver North running rampant, and Rambo's ridiculously successful fantasy.

Today's anti-depressant drugs offer an individualized treatment for one's problems. You fill the prescription alone, you take the medications by yourself, you deal with your insurance plan alone, and you monitor the effects of the medication, usually, alone. As more and more people take anti-depressants, fewer people choose therapy — mental health treatment in the company of another person. The collective consciousness and community are replaced by the singular, isolating act of taking a pill in a private,
sheltered moment. The paradigm has shifted violently — no longer are patients working with a therapist to address their real problems; they are working largely alone and in relation only with a pill.

The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out
of enormous prizes, was the one public
event to which the proles [proletarians
or working class] paid serious attention.
It was probably that there were some millions
of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal
if not the only reason for remaining alive.
George Orwell's 1984 {1949}

Consumer culture is, in many ways, a culture of extended childhood. The child's fantasy is that life is lived without pain and that there are no consequences for fleeing from life's difficulties. The faith of consumer culture is that all pain, tensions, and discomfort can and should be eliminated by industrial products and services.

Jean Shinoda Bolen, MD, psychiatrist, Jungian analyst and clinical professor of psychiatry at UCSF, writes that illness and depression are soul-shaping encounters, and have been perceived for centuries that way. They help us respond to a wake-up call and offer us turning points to find meaning in our lives.

Already concerned about the movement toward biological psychiatry, eminent psychiatrist Morton Resier published an article in 1986 entitled, "Are Psychiatric Educators 'Losing The Mind?". In it he writes, "I talked with some of the [psychiatric] residents and found that their approach and mind set in the interviews [were] astoundingly unpsychological. Once they had done the DSM-IV 'inventory' and had identified target symptoms for psychopharmacology, the diagnostic workup and meaningful communication stopped. Worse than that, to my mind, so did the residents' curiosity about the patient as a person — even to the point where often there was no answer to such basic questions as why the patient came for treatment at this time and what seemed to be worrying him or her."

Nearly ten years later Steven Sharfstein, the president of the American Psychiatric Association, echoed Morton Resier's concerns when he told his fellow psychiatrists, "As we address these Big Pharma issues, we must examine the fact that as a profession, we have allowed the bio-psycho-social model to become the bio-bio-bio model."

Symptoms can be seen, but a lack of emotional, interpersonal, existential, or spiritual wholeness does not show up in any lab test or X-ray. What can be intuited and known often cannot be quantified — and, therefore, is not taken seriously in Western science. Healing the source of despair entails becoming whole, and this too cannot be scientifically measured.

Dr. Levine continues, "I observed how the course work of mental health professionals fractured the wholeness of their knowledge. Future psychiatrists narrowly focus on brain chemistry — the bio-bio-bio model. And in the course work of both psychiatrists and psychologists, no serious attention is given to cultural, economic, and political issues. Academia can be a place of narrow, specialized turfs. Instead of freely exploring the entire landscape, academicians are often quite timid about 'trespassing' onto another's domain. Among professors there are certainly rebels against this practice, and they are fond of joking, 'Academia is a place where you specialize more and more about less and less with this logical endpoint: knowing absolutely everything about absolutely nothing.'"