Disclaimer: It is not the intention of this review to tell you how you should or should not medicate yourself. Personally, I would not take anti-depressant drugs in a pink fit, and have, in the past, refused them when they have been offered to me by well-meaning doctors. You should do what you think is best given advice from your doctor – with that said, read this book so you might have some questions to ask that doctor when and if they tell you to self-lobotomise (or whatever it is the chemical

Disclaimer: It is not the intention of this review to tell you how you should or should not medicate yourself. Personally, I would not take anti-depressant drugs in a pink fit, and have, in the past, refused them when they have been offered to me by well-meaning doctors. You should do what you think is best given advice from your doctor – with that said, read this book so you might have some questions to ask that doctor when and if they tell you to self-lobotomise (or whatever it is the chemicals they want you to buy ultimately do).



In 2010 (one of the benefits of good reads is knowing when I read stuff) I read a book called ‘Doctoring the Mind’ – in many ways this book is an updated and slightly more left wing version of that. I would encourage you to read this book, because, well, because we live in a society that is literally driving us all insane and we need to do something about that, and what needs to be done will be more difficult and demanding than swallowing a pill, sorry about that, but it had to be said. And this book provides ways and means that could help us all shift away from our current insanity and maybe even get well.



Like Doctoring the Mind this book argues that most depressive illnesses are simply not due to dysfunctions in brain chemistry, dysfunctions that need to be addressed by expensive tables conveniently produced by extremely wealthy drug companies – but rather that most depressive illnesses are completely predictable and rational responses to a world that is insane. Therefore, trying to fix these ‘illnesses’ by focusing on the individual and the chemistry in their brain is not only not likely to work, but in fact perpetuates the situation that caused the illness in the first place.



In one of her books, bell hooks says that she never takes aspirin. This isn’t because she is some sort of masochist, but rather because she believes that aspirin is a metaphor for everything that is wrong in our society. People do not feel pain without a reason, pain means there is something causing you to feel pain in the situation you find yourself in. Aspirin does not address the cause of your pain, rather it removes the pain, it removes the warning that the situation you are in is causing you damage. That is, aspirin masks your need to change. When I first started going to the gym one of the instructors there told me to never take anti-inflammatory pain killers for exactly the same reason. Fix your technique, doing the wrong thing and covering the pain that causes with drugs is the road to being crippled with lasting and serious pain.



This book confirms virtually all of my prejudices, so, naturally enough, it is getting 5 stars and recommended. I’ve already gotten my mother to read it, a woman at work and suggested it to my eldest daughter. So, what are those confirmed prejudices? Well, first of all that we are fundamentally social animals and so if something goes wrong with us, we ought to at least consider our social situation as being potentially implicated. Both Doctoring the Mind and this book stress that mental illnesses can have three causes: biological, psychological and social. The point is that for decades we have only considered one of these causes and therefore only one set of treatments. We have only concerned ourselves with the biological and that means we have only considered how brain chemistry might be the reason for these illnesses. When I first studied philosophy at university some of the people in the class were also studying psychology and I overheard one of them say when recommending someone to go see for some therapy, “make sure you go see a psychologist, not a psychiatrist, because a psychiatrist will only try to give you drugs”. Isn’t that disgusting.



This book shows that very few depressive illnesses have anything at all to do with brain chemistry and that therefore the treatments that seek to adjust one’s brain chemistry (via drugs) are simply never going to work. He provides lots of metaphors for this – one of my favourites being trying to treat the smoke coming out of a house by blowing it away with a huge fan, something that will only make the fire inside the house that you can’t see all the worse.



I’ve only just finished reading Bullshit Jobs – and this is a complementary story to that one. There is an excellent chapter in this about how feeling you are doing pointless work makes you feel worthless and therefore causes you real damage. And yet, the whole point of modern capitalism is to make the majority of the population virtual automatons. In fact, this is precisely the lesson of Taylor’s Scientific Management – that workers are too stupid to know how best to perform their work in the most efficient ways and so they need to submit themselves unquestioningly to the will of the scientific manager. In fact, the less the worker uses their brain, the more effective they will be. However, we know that feeling you have no control over your own actions and living in a world in which you feel completely disassociated is about as good a definition of mental illness as you can get. To be human is to be efficacious – ironically enough though, those most likely to promote the benefits of scientific management are also those who speak loudest in favour of freedom, although, admittedly they generally talk of ‘freedom from’ government regulations, rather than ‘freedom to’ do anything other than choose between various consumer goods.



I’ve never been all that attracted to meditation – in fact, I think we are far too obsessed with ourselves and too many of those I’ve met in the past who have spoken to me about meditation have seemed a bit too self-obsessed. But there is a nice bit in this book where he talks about meditating for 15 minutes each day in an attempt to feel real joy at the good fortune of other people, even of the good fortune of your enemies or people you envy. He also talks of the deep psychological benefits that come from truly doing something to help other people. I think this is just wonderful.



Like I said, I have a profound belief that we are primarily social animals but that modern society has moved us so far away from belonging to communities that someone like Margaret Thatcher can say there is no such thing as society and people might even well believe it. I don’t believe it. The further we become atomised, the less human we become, and the more e sick and isolated and depressed we become as a consequence. We end up suffocating in our own self-loathing. The answer is not to turn further inward, but rather to come back home to the connections that really matter.



I want to end with something he says quite early on in the book. There are a lot of grave stones in the world – mostly these tell how much the person was loved by their friends and their family. None of them say ‘Here lies John, one of the truly great accountants of his age’. Our society forces us to be isolated individuals. We need to reconnect, it’s for our own good.

