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An Atlas of Depression
by Andrew Solomon
But do we have the equivalent of an environmental movement, a system to contain the damage we are doing to the social ozone layer? That there are treatments should not cause us to ignore the problem that is treated. We need to be terrified by the statistics. What is to be done? Sometimes it seems that the rate of illness and the number of cures are in a sort of competition to see which can outstrip the other. Few of us want to, or can, give up modernity of thought any more than we want to give up modernity of material existence. But we must start doing small things now to lower the level of socio-emotional pollution. We must look for faith (in anything: God or the self or other people or politics or beauty or just about anything else) and structure. We must help the disenfranchised whose suffering undermines so much of the world's joy -- for the sake both of those huddled masses and of the privileged people who lack profound motivation in their own lives. We must practice the business of love, and we must teach it too. We must ameliorate the circumstances that conduce to our terrifyingly high levels of stress. We must hold out against violence, and perhaps against its representations. This is not a sentimental proposal; it is as urgent as the cry to save the rain forest.
At some point, a point we have not quite reached but will, I think, reach soon, the level of damage will begin to be more terrible than the advances we buy with that damage. There will be no revolution, but there will be the advent, perhaps, of different kinds of schools, different models of family and community, different processes of information. If we are to continue on earth, we will have to do so. We will balance treating illness with changing the circumstances that cause it. We will look to prevention as much as to cure. In the maturity of the new millennium, we will, I hope, save this earth's rain forests, the ozone layer, the rivers and streams, the oceans; and we will also save, I hope, the minds and hearts of the people who live here. Then we will curb our escalating fear of the demons of the noon -- our anxiety and depression.
The people of Cambodia live in the compass of immemorial tragedy. During the 1970s, the revolutionary Pol Pot established a Maoist dictatorship in Cambodia in the name of what he called the Khmer Rouge. Years of bloody civil war followed, during which more than 20 percent of the population was slaughtered. The educated elite was obliterated, and the peasantry was regularly moved from one location to another, some of them taken into prison cells where they were mocked and tortured; the entire country lived in perpetual fear. It is hard to rank wars -- recent atrocities in Rwanda have been particularly ravaging -- but certainly the Pol Pot period was as awful as any time anywhere in recent history. What happens to your emotions when you have seen a quarter of your compatriots murdered, when you have lived yourself in the hardship of a brutal regime, when you are fighting against the odds to rebuild a devastated nation? I hoped to see what happens to feeling among the citizens of a nation when they have all endured such traumatic stress, are desperately poor, have virtually no resources, and have little chance for education or employment. I might have chosen other locations to find suffering, but I did not want to go into a country at war, since the despair psychology of wartime is usually frenzied, while the despair that follows devastation is more numb and all-encompassing. Cambodia is not a country in which faction fought brutally against faction; it is a country in which everyone was at war with everyone else, in which all the mechanisms of society were completely annihilated, in which there was no love left, no idealism, nothing good for anyone.
The Cambodians are in general affable, and they are friendly as can be to foreigners who visit them. Most of them are soft-spoken, gentle, and attractive. It's hard to believe that this lovely country is the one in which Pol Pot's atrocities took place. Everyone I met had a different explanation for how the Khmer Rouge could have happened there, but none of these explanations made sense, just as none of the explanations for the Cultural Revolution or for Stalinism or for Nazism makes sense. These things happen to societies, and in retrospect it is possible to understand why a nation was especially vulnerable to them; but where in the human imagination such behaviors originate is unknowable. The social fabric is always very thin, but it is impossible to know how it gets vaporized entirely as it did in these societies. The American ambassador there told me that the greatest problem for the Khmer people is that traditional Cambodian society has no peaceful mechanism to resolve conflict. "If they have differences," he said, "they have to deny them and suppress them totally, or they have to take out knives and fight." A Cambodian member of the current government said that the people had been too subservient to an absolute monarch for too many years and didn't think to fight against authority until it was too late. I heard at least a dozen other stories; I remain skeptical.
Copyright © 2001 by Andrew Solomon
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