Happy pills and the worship of suffering

I should rename this blog "Let's pick on Fr Neuhaus" for all the material I write at his expense. This post is no different. In today's installment the good father discusses the medicalization of happiness:

What he calls artificial happiness is being promoted by mood-enhancing drugs recklessly prescribed by primary-care physicians, by the obsession with exercise, and by “alternative” medical practices from acupuncture to meditating with crystals. What Dr. Dworkin has to say about mood-enhancing or psychotropic drugs is I think the most persuasive and most important.

The book is also about turf battles within the medical profession, between primary-care physicians, specialists, psychiatrists, and the pharmaceutical companies. Dworkin’s argument is that the champions of “artificial happiness” are winning all the battles and now have recruited religion, as well, to their cause. He is greatly alarmed that religious leaders are not alarmed by the psychotropic revolution. I believe he is on to something to which more attention should be paid.

In our discussion, I suggested that I was not very taken with his extended treatment of the fascinating discussions about the connections between brain, mind, and consciousness—discussions in which I have played a modest part over the years. Against the more vulgar materialists and determinists, the book seems to come out on the side of the proponents of “emergent materialism.” I indicated that I found this position philosophically unpersuasive, positing as it does the grounding of the rational in the irrational. Dworkin indicated that he was not advocating that position, only reporting it. I wish that were more clear in the book.

It should also be underscored that the pharmaceutical remedies for clinical depression—in the tradition usually called melancholy of various gradations, or acedia, or spiritual torpor—can frequently be a great blessing, so long as they help equip people to address other problems rather than escape or evade them.
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At the core of Dworkin’s enterprise is a sharp critique of the now widespread notion that unhappiness is a disease that is to be medically treated. I spoke of the Christian spiritual tradition in which unhappiness in many forms is an essential part of growth, also in the growth toward holiness. The writings of saints such as Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Mother Teresa of Calcutta are replete with counsel on the uses of unhappiness. Pushing the envelope for the crowd at the Strand, I alluded to the understanding of “redemptive suffering” in the course of attaining happiness, as in wholeness, as in holiness. My impression is that this got into territory where Dr. Dworkin, and some in the audience, were not comfortable, as in happy. But our solid agreement is in contending that it is false and dangerous to go along with the notion that unhappiness is a disease to be medically remedied.

And Dworkin is surely right that we need to contend also against religious leaders who aid and abet the notion that happiness—as in feeling good about oneself—is the goal of life. I believe he exaggerates the dominance of the tradition associated with Norman Vincent Peale, “positive thinking,” and feel-good religion in general. His point is that the psychotropic revolution is putting such religious approaches out of business, and with the unwitting cooperation of the happiness preachers.

As long term readers of this blog know, I take antidepressants and I am very suspicious about arguments to the effect that such medications are a copout, or a way to avoid dealing with the real problem behind the depression, or that they somehow rob the depressed person of some meaningful suffering. I'm glad that Neuhaus didn't go there. I haven't read the book, so I can't say whether Dworkin's alarmism over psychotropic drugs is along these lines or is something to be taken seriously. Besides antidepressants and drugs like Ritalin, I'd be interested to know just what drugs are being prescribed, for what symptoms, and to what effect in the lives of the people taking them. There is certainly a danger in setting expectations for drug therapies too high, but I wouldn't assume that the widespread use of them equates to abuse.

But I think that there are other agendas at play in the debate over these drugs, and Neuhaus has certainly tipped his hand regarding his. Neuhaus comes close to representing in his comments that perverse value that I have labelled the worship of suffering. It is almost as if Neuhaus welcomes suffering as just more raw material for his personal holiness project. Now it is important to learn how to cope with suffering, because I believe that suffering will inevitably affect every person from time to time. But a meaningful life cannot be built upon a welcoming of suffering. I've quoted Victor Frankl many times on this blog, only because his insight into meaning and suffering is so blindingly obvious. Frankl said that one can find meaning in suffering only when the suffering is unavoidable. When suffering is avoidable, one should avoid it. Willingly enduring avoidable suffering is meaningless, it is masochism.

I think that the other bolded quote above exposes the other major agenda behind much of the criticism of antidepressants and other psychotropic drugs, that it is threatening to put the religious priesthoods out of business. Priests are the original grief counsellors. Like personal injury lawyers and modern grief counsellors, they rely on the suffering of others to earn their keep. Now don't think that I'm being overly cynical. Suffering exists, and people have the right to offer their assistance to those who suffer. The main criteria for judging these practicioners of the ameliorative arts is by their effectiveness. If they can help those who suffer, then more power to them.

But when new methods or new tecnologies arise that compete with these practicioners for the service of amelioration, lets not pretend that the protestations of the old guard are always motivated by the welfare of their clientele. One gets a sense that Neuhaus is struggling not just with the prospect that these drugs will eat into his pastoral care practice, but that they support a philosophy that poses a direct threat to the very basis of the religious ideal. That philosophy is materialism. If suffering can be relieved by material means, than the whole theoretical structure upon which suffering has been explained and justified, beginning with Original Sin and winding its convoluted way through the substitution, death, atonement, resurrection and onward, seems to be on a much shakier foundation.