Recently I posted something about how so many in Britain are now
taking antidepressants that trace levels of Prozac have been found in
their groundwater and rivers. This sounds like something out of a
dystopian science fiction novel, but, as usual, the BBC webpage which
tells of this, doesn't tell of what this means about the level of
helplessness in Britain. Since plenty of statistics along these lines
exist to show the same level of helplessness in the USA, you'd think
that plenty of sociologists would be researching how real this
helplessness is, so that people would realize that just because his
culture says that a problem is just one of those realities that normal
people deal with, doesn't make this true. They also could show what
depressed guilt feelings and self-blame, indicate. At the very least,
those on this newsgroup would develop better insight to both what
happened to them, and the self-blame that they likely feel. Yet
there's basically two reasons why this may not stand out to you as
something that needs as much sociological muckraking as any dystopia
would. The first is that in the West, even decades ago, most
depressions would involve self-blame, so most depressed people would
have believed in the precepts that go behind them. The second is that
ever since the Reagan era, such self-reliant self-responsible precepts
have gained such predominance that sociological studies that would
have seemed very vital around the 1960's, would now seem
intellectualist, negativist, defeatist, etc.

Recently I read in a current book on depression, the author saying
that he didn't understand why the classic Elizabethan-era book on
depression, The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton, didn't say
anything about guilt feelings and self-blame. The Anatomy of
Melancholy says such things as, "He dare not come in company for fear
he should be misused, disgraced, overshoot himself in gesture or
speeches, or be sick; he thinks every man observes him, aims at him,
owes him malice, " and that the ancient Greek medical writings about
"humors" said, "If the malady arise from melancholy (cold, dry, and
black), the patient is cold and bashful, sad and solitary, fearful and
suspicious." Speaking of those ancient writings, in the fifth and
fourth centuries B. C., Hippocrates described melancholy as an
"aversion to food, despondency, sleeplessness, irritability,
restlessness," and said "fear or depression that is prolonged means
melancholia." So it seems that by moderns standards, depressed people
in both Elizabethan England, and ancient Greece along with all the
other areas that influenced it (such as Arabia), were playing the
victim role, feeling misused disgraced irritable and fearful. That
might seem strange to modern Westerners who've internalized our
idiosyncratic conceptions of self-responsibility.

And one could see those conceptions very clearly, in the fact that not
only has the Serenity Prayer become so popular, but if one says that
it opens the door to limitless victim-blaming, that might seem to be a
bad attitude. Sure, most Americans know of only the first sentence of
The Serenity Prayer, "God, grant me serenity to accept the things I
cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know
the difference," and not the specifics which follow it, "Living one
day at a time, Enjoying one moment at a time; Accepting hardship as a
pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world as it is not
as I would have it; Trusting that You will make all things right if I
surrender to Your will; So that I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with You forever in the next.--Amen." Yet even
the part that everyone knows, says that, without limits or conditions,
if a problem is yours then you're simply going to have to deal with it
physically if you can change it and emotionally if you can't, and this
is completely irrespective of how much hardship, sinfulness, or
anything else, is involved. Victim correction is a panacea, since one
must perfect his own tactics in taking care of his own problems,
irrespective of anything else.

To see how literal could be the socially-acceptable demands that
someone live up to this standard, one need only look in the literature
of Twelve-Step groups for addicts' friends an family members, such as
Al-Anon, Nar-Anon, and Gam-Anon. The whole idea of Al-Anon was for
the friends and family members of alcoholics, to learn to use AA's
transcendent spirituality to cope with their problems, and the other
friends' and family members' groups followed from there. AA's Big
Book claims that the reason for their anathematizing feelings of
resentment anger and fear was that those who'd have had the drinking
problems that led to the alcoholism would be very likely to be
immaturely impetuous. When they feel misused disgraced irritable
fearful etc., they likely are expecting the world to be as they'd have
it. Yet when addicts' friends and family members anathematize such
feelings, they probably have good reasons for feeling that way.
They're simply to think and act along the lines of, "Accepting
hardship as a pathway to peace; Taking as Jesus did this sinful world
as it is not as I would have it." Just like everyone else, they have
to figure that if their reactions weren't adequate to deal with their
devastating realities, came up short, failed, and lost the battle,
then this makes them inadequate losers and failures with very
consequential shortcomings.

For example, the handbook of Gamblers Anonymous, Sharing Recovery
Through Gamblers Anonymous, says near the beginning of its chapter for
Gam-Anon,

"When the family member or friend gains an understanding of the
gambling problem and attends Gam-Anon regularly, the compulsive
gambler may eventually attend Gamblers Anonymous meetings. However,
Gam-Anon members are cautioned not to expect this result and that the
reason for attending Gam-Anon is to find a new way of life for
themselves.

"The aim of the Gam-Anon program is to aid the individuals involved
with a compulsive gambler to find help by changing their own lives.
This is accomplished by the spiritual growth gained through living the
Gam-Anon program, by giving support and understanding to compulsive
gamblers and by providing comfort to their families.

"Living or being associated with a compulsive gambler creates its own
kind of hell. For most people, it is a devastating experience: family
relationships become unbearably strained and the home is filled with
bitterness, frustration and resentment. Emotionally, the stress takes
its toll as the life of the Gam-Anon member seems to crumble and
become unmanageable; tensions are aggravated because life, in material
terms, is unstable. At any moment the house might be lost or the
furniture repossessed. There may not be enough money to put food on
the table or clothe the children."

Since our modern Western concepts of self-responsibility say that
we're all simply response-able for our own welfare, then if this is
your reality, this is what you have to deal with. If a Gam-Anon
member responded to that by saying, "But I'm not going to take the
part of The Serenity Prayer that everyone knows, that literally," the
group would likely respond as if of course each of us must take
whatever self-responsibility that his realities dictate, and that's
all there is to it.

And the American mainstream wouldn't regard this as extremist. In my
first posting about the commonality of depression and self-blame, I
cited four sources of statistics on how common depression, anxiety,
etc., are in the USA. One is a book which tells family members how
they could best take care of their families' problems. One is a
magazine article which does the same. One is a medical book telling
general practitioner doctors how to treat their patients. The other
is a webpage on a study by Johns Hopkins which said that since 40% of
welfare mothers suffer from depression, a very effective step in
welfare reform would be to get them medical treatment for this. Even
problems as big as that commonality of depression, are automatically
treated as if of course each of us must take whatever
self-responsibility that his realities dictate, and that's all there
is to it.

And this premise is also what the cognitive distortions of modern
Western depression, boil down to. David D. Burns, MD wrote in his book
Feeling Good, that these are: All-or-Nothing Thinking,
Overgeneralization, Mental Filter, Disqualifying the Positive, Jumping
to Conclusions, Magnification [of what's wrong with the depressed or
right with others] or Minimization [of what's right with the depressed
or wrong with others], Emotional Reasoning, Should Statements,
Labeling and Mislabeling, and Personalization [which Dr. Burns defines
as, "You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event
which in fact you were not primarily responsible for."].

And these tendencies got even worse with such Reaganist tendencies as
insistence on self-reliance no matter what one must deal with, and
anti-intellectualism. Sociological studies on the causes of both the
rampant depression, anxiety, etc., and the self-blame, would have
seemed very necessary around the 1960's, but now, they'd seem
intellectualist.

A typical book along these lines was William Ryan's Blaming the
Victim, published in 1971. The victim-blaming that it described was
pretty namby-pamby compared to today's victim-blaming. He described
the blaming of impoverished people for their own poverty, not because
of anything endogenous, but for attitude problems that they learned
from poverty. "Cultural deprivation" is blamed. "In a word, he is
'disadvantaged' and 'socially deprived,' they say, and this, of
course, accounts for his failure (_his_ failure, they say) to learn
much in school." "We are encouraged to confine our attention to the
child and to dwell on all his alleged defects." Victim-blamers
claimed that, "The stigma that marks the victim and accounts for his
victimization is an acquired stigma, a stigma of social, rather than
genetic, origin. But the stigma, the defect, the fatal
difference--though derived in the past from environmental forces--is
still located _within_ the victim, inside his own skin." The last
step of the victim-blaming process was to "assign a government
bureaucrat to" take care of the problems supposedly inside the
victims. The whole idea of this book was to say that rather than
blaming problems inside the victims, we should look at problems
outside of them, such as problems getting jobs with living wages.

The modern version of victim-blaming would go like this, and since
this would be considered the "self-help" and "self-improvement" of the
impoverished, no exposés about this would be written: The
impoverished people who are to have their behavior modified and
thoughts reformed, start out by showing their instructor documented
statistics which prove their poor odds in getting jobs with living
wages, and how there are a lot less jobs with living wages now than in
1971. He'd then accept that these are true. Yet since impoverished
people can't change this but can change their own thoughts and
actions, their own optimism and courage, that's what they should focus
their attention on. As with Gam-Anon members, the impoverished would
gauge their failures and inadequacies, in term of whether they've
failed to, or were inadequate to, deal with the demands of their
realities. They'd be encouraged to confine their own attention to
themselves and to dwell on all their alleged defects, because they can
change their own defects, and can't change the job market. If they're
among the 40% of welfare mothers suffering from depression, then no
matter what caused it, they can't change that, and can change their
own medical care. Anything they correct might be acquired or might be
endogenous, but either way, correcting it would improve their odds.
If one fails to get a job with a living wage, that would indeed be
_his_ failure; other people could, so why couldn't he? And this level
of self-reliance is exactly what's needed to free our society from the
dreaded government bureaucrats. Sure this would require plenty of
all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralization, mental filter,
disqualifying the positive, etc., but they'd be most likely to succeed
if they focused their attention on what they should be doing better,
magnified what they can change and minimized what they can't, and
labeled everything in terms of how it serves their goals. What
difference would it make whether or not they were primarily
responsible for their own problems?

An exposé about this, or about, "The aim... is accomplished by the
spiritual growth... [in dealing with the fact that] at any moment the
house might be lost or the furniture repossessed. There may not be
enough money to put food on the table or clothe the children," or
about the causes of dystopian rates of depression and anxiety, would
be a lot more vivid than were exposés on such things as sending in the
bureaucrats to make up for supposed results of being socially
deprived. And as one could see in the guilt feelings and self-blame
that are characteristic of modern Western depression, this is relevant
not only to poor people, but to everybody who has to interact with
others under those rules. Yet we aren't coming up with such exposés,
since this ain't 1971 anymore.

Recently I posted something about how so many in Britain are now
taking antidepressants that trace levels of Prozac have been found in
their groundwater and rivers.