The Chronicle of Higher Education features a piece by Eric Wilson, an English professor at Wake Forest. Wilson calls attention to the cultural effect of melancholy.
Kierkegaard, Van Gogh, Keats, Woolf – those are the names that initially come to our minds when we think of melancholy – and we’re sure there are many others. Would these thinkers and painters and writers have created what they did if they had recourse to Prozac or Paxil or Xanax?
Given these virtues of melancholia, why are psychiatrists and psychologists attempting to "cure" depression as if it were a terrible disease? Obviously, those suffering severe depression — suicidal and bordering on psychosis — require serious medications. But what of those who possess mild to moderate depression? Should these potential visionaries and innovators eradicate their melancholia with the help of a pill?Wilson’s questions are challenging.
They also raise a deeper question, formulated by Paul Kramer, author of Listening to Prozac: “What sort of art would be meaningful or moving in a society free of depression?”
In a brilliant NYT Magazine article, “There’s Nothing Deep About Depression,” Kramer suggests that most of us, in spite of our self-avowed enlightenment, hold on to the age-old reverence for mental illness. This, he asserts, is regrettable. “Depression is not a perspective. It is a disease.”
But what about creativity?
Kramer acknowledges that “a society free of depression” would have consequences for human creativity. At the very least, he writes,
Freedom from depression would make the world safe for high neurotics, virtuosi of empathy, emotional bungee-jumpers. It would make the world safe for van Gogh.Safe – but at what cost? That question, of course, assumes that the cultural effects of melancholy are also benefits. Maybe. But that’s a whole other discussion.
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