CAPTURE

Unraveling the Mystery of Mental Suffering

By David A. Kessler

406 pp. Harper Wave/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99.

The writer David Foster Wallace killed himself at the age of 46, after decades of struggling with depression. For all his extraordinary talent and success, he could not pry himself away from the cast of mind that wound up convincing him that he’d be better off dead. “Jumping out of a burning building,” his mother tells David A. Kessler in his new book “Capture.” “That’s the way I view David’s suicide.” The case of Wallace, says Kessler, is a tragic instance of “capture”: his Big Idea about how to conceptualize the mind and the brain. “ ‘Depression’ is a label used to describe a group of symptoms. It is not a cause,” Kessler reminds us. And where psychiatry has failed to illuminate, capture offers a new lens through which to understand human behavior.

Kessler, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, has spent much of his career researching the ways in which human will can be so inexplicably hijacked, as his book “The End of Overeating” shows. With “Capture,” he offers the intriguing idea that one brain-based mechanism underlies a wide range of behaviors from suicide to addiction to artistic obsession. “The theory of capture is composed of three basic elements: narrowing of attention, perceived lack of control and change in affect, or emotional state,” he writes. And who among us hasn’t experienced this kind of mental vise grip, this total preoccupation that reshapes our lives in its image? This is capture, says Kessler, and it is, according to him, what drove John Belushi to disappear into drug addiction, and Virginia Woolf to walk into the river. But capture can also turn us toward constructive, even exalted, purposes, as it did for Martin Luther, when he set in motion the Protestant Reformation, or Bill Wilson, when he experienced the spiritual awakening that helped him recover from alcoholism and found Alcoholics Anonymous. It might be possible, Kessler says, to learn to harness our own capture circuitry.