The Merchants of Melancholy

Depressed consumers give more than $10 billion a year to drug companies, hoping that corporate chemists really have found a cure for the melancholy that afflicts them. But even our psychiatrists' certainty that chemical imbalances trigger depression has begun to waver. After all, the doctors of the classical and medieval world were also certain that alchemical imbalances spurred the affliction they called melancholia, yet the modern world's ability to manufacture pharmaceuticals hasn't alleviated the problem; instead, it appears to have aggravated it.

The ancients saw depression as a troubling, if unusual, condition. But by the early 1700s, physicians, like Dr. George Cheyne, began worrying about a "class of distemper with atrocious and frightful symptoms, scarce known to our ancestors" which causes "almost one third of the complaints of the people." And today, most everyone will be afflicted by it, some for years at a time. Depression is the modern world's leading cause of disability.

But what could explain the spread of despondency over the last four centuries? Might nature see some evolutionary advantage to depression that encourages it to rewire our brains? Probably. Both biologists and psychologists now suspect that depression is analogous to pain. Just as pain warns us about environmental hazards to our bodies, and goads us into withdrawing from, or eliminating, whatever is hurting us, depression is probably warning us about social hazards to our minds, and drives us into withdrawing from, or eliminating, whatever is hurting our psyches. But nature hasn't spawned a new variety of people who are more disposed to depression; man has just contrived a new variation of society which predisposes us to depression.

This new society began in the 17th century, when the West transformed itself into modernity. It would produced people who would rather labor than play, who would suspect cooperation instead of competition, and who would insist on specialization over generalization. Religion, economics, and training took us from pastoral peace-of-mind to modern melancholy.

The Protestant Reformation is one of the markers of modernism. Dour Calvinists and Puritans rebelled against the festive Catholics' stern, but forgiving, God, who saw the pleasures in life as a naughty, but entirely forgivable, relief from the workaday world. And they replaced him with an unforgiving God, who would damn us if we succumbed to pleasurable vices instead of hard work. The Protestants saw our world as a vale of tears: a labor camp where we all serve out the sentence for Adam and Eve's original sin. Only constant toil could earn us a reprieve from this God. And while few people still believe in a world quite this grim today, the notion that anything which feels good must, somehow, be bad, is still entrenched in modern society, and so is the work ethic. We may no longer labor to prevent the Devil from stealing our souls, but we still feel guilty when we stop working to have fun.

This need to toil also aided the modern world's renewal of mercantilism. Feudal farmers and craftsmen had lived in a world where their neighbors weren't their competitors. Farmers worked the land with each other and craftsmen banded together in guilds, so peasants never needed to undermine each others' efforts. In the medieval world, competition for wealth and status was the curse of the gentry. But mercantilism not only freed peasants from feudalism, it also condemned them to the suspicions that plagued their former masters. Now everyone, not just the lords and ladies, felt the need to compete with each other for wealth, status, and even survival. In a mercantile world, you can't really trust anyone else, because their profit comes only at your expense. And profit is not only everyone's means of survival, it's also the measure of everyone's worth.

This new need to profit off everyone else fed into another staple of modernism, specialization. Large profits require large scale. And scale comes most easily through organization and regimentation. Workers are most efficient when they only do one thing, over and over, in a constant, predictable manner. But Adam Smith, one of the founding fathers of modern economics, saw a human cost to this and warned us about how alienating this specialization could be: "The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, ... always the same" falls into a stupor "acquired at the expense of his intellectual ... and social virtues." Even worse, specialization not only numbs you to your work, and your environment, it also alienates you from anything you might enjoy doing. In a specialized world, storytelling, music, and sports are no longer activities we all participate in. They're spectator activities: commodities that must be purchased, like anti-depressants, to relieve us from the from the mind-numbing world we've created for ourselves.

In other words, the very same ideas which make it easy for the modern world to churn out billions of dollars worth of anti-depressants may also create the need for those anti-depressants. Maybe we should listen less to the imperatives of modernity and more to moods of our minds. We're not depressed because we can't manufacture enough pills, we're depressed because the way we manufacture those pills deprives us of the conviviality, trust, and engagement we need to be happy.