The crowd was overwhelmingly male, very close in age, largely from the Midwest, and engaged in a kind of generational struggle to make sense of the postmodern literary legacy—of Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and others—that they found both consuming and unsatisfactory, especially as a guide to writing about the new, weird America of the eighties and nineties.
.. In November, Wallace told Harvard health authorities that he felt he was a threat to himself, and he was sent to a locked ward at McLean Hospital, the well-known psychiatric institution in Belmont, Massachusetts. The head of the Whiting Foundation heard the news and asked Mary Karr, who had recently won a Whiting Award for her poetry and was living nearby with her husband, if she would go see Wallace when he was in detox.
.. “I hated The Broom of the System,” Karr says. “I thought it was one of the worst books ever written.” She felt Wallace was “showing off,” writing fiction that pointed to all that he’d read rather than stirring feeling in the reader. And wasn’t that the point? If the literary bright white guys were going to follow in the line of the bright white guys of a generation before, she wasn’t interested.
.. Was fiction about mastering the sweep of the culture in an innovative way, or was it about telling a more intimate story and delivering reading pleasure?
.. He once wrote to her about the “long thing I want to do” and said that when he looked at material he’d written earlier, it wasn’t as “awful” as he feared, but it was “way too concerned with presenting itself as witty arty writing instead of effecting any kind of emotional communication with people. I feel like I have changed, learned so much about what good writing ought to be. Much of what I’ve learned I’ve learned from you, more from the example of your work and your feelings about your work than from any direct advice. You’re good about not giving advice; you just live, and let me watch.”
.. Wallace remarks in the note that he seems better able to summon enthusiasm for something when it is secondary to something else in his life. He writes, “The key to ’92 is that MMK was most important; IJ was just a means to her end (as it were).”
“Who is IJ?” Karr said.
“Infinite Jest.”
“Oh!”
She did not seem flattered. I read the sentence again. “How is it a means—to capture me, is that it?” Karr said. “That’s crazy. That’s really insane.”
.. As Franzen saw it, Wallace had managed to incorporate the kind of broad-canvas social critique that the great postmodernists did into a narrative “of deadly personal pertinence.”
.. Franzen became more secure in himself in the wake of The Corrections, Costello says. But Wallace? “Dave never had a secure hour in his life.”
.. Like Eugenides, whose search for faith is a major element of The Marriage Plot,Wallace quietly sought out spiritual answers and flirted with joining the Catholic Church, as Karr later did. (When they were together, they tried to pray every day.)
A Depression-Fighting Strategy That Could Go Viral
These studies were proof that depression could be treated in poor countries by lay people. Now these researchers are trying to figure out how to streamline these interventions to the minimum outlay of resources needed to maintain excellent results. Many models are being tried, which integrate mental health care into primary care, employ community health workers or piggyback therapy on to other kinds of services. But one very promising strategy is to rely on peers as therapists. “The idea is to really make it go viral,” said Vikram Patel, a psychiatrist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the leader of the Goa study.
.. Before they started recruiting members, the facilitators went into their target communities to meet with local leaders and introduce the concept of depression. “People tell us someone is sad, has lost interest, and cannot concentrate,” said Christine Nanyondo, who supervises the facilitators (as a high school graduate, she ran groups in Verdeli’s 2002 study). “But they say it’s because of witchcraft, or laziness. In all the villages we’ve been in, we’ve met only two women who went somewhere for counseling for their depression. Others buy pills. They think maybe they have malaria.”
What If We’re Wrong About Depression?
He doesn’t believe all cases of depression are triggered by problems that need to be solved. “Depression is not like a single trait,” he said. “It’s really a series of multiple traits that have in common sadness and anhedonia.” But, he added, research shows that many people with depression can point to troubles that they believe brought it on.
And if in fact depression is at least in part an adaptation meant to help us deal with difficult problems, he thinks this could have big implications for the way we diagnose it.
.. WILL THINKING OF DEPRESSION as an adaptive trait end up changing how we treat it? Steven Hollon, a professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, thinks it’s an interesting possibility. “Most things that don’t serve a useful purpose tend to drop out along the line, and depression hasn’t,” he told Op-Talk. “You have to wonder if it plays some kind of role.”
Dr. Andrews’s idea of rumination as an aid to problem-solving is “certainly not widely accepted yet,” Dr. Hollon added, “but that doesn’t mean he won’t turn out to be right. And to develop a measure to get at the constructs he has in mind is an absolutely essential step along the way.”
.. The idea that the disorder can help with problem-solving is “one of the more popular psychological theories of the purpose of depression,” he told Op-Talk. But “getting depressed to kind of think through your problems seems to be a pretty high-cost” adaptation, he said, “because depression’s no day at the beach.”
Clinicians who treat depressed people, he added, often find that “they’re ruminative in a way that really is very self-defeating and self-destructive.”
.. His team has experimented with treating depressed patients with an anti-inflammatory drug, and found that those with high levels of a particular blood marker for inflammation improved significantly. “This for us in psychiatry is a first,” he said, “where you can actually measure something in the blood.”
Roget Invented the Thesaurus at Age 73
Being nuts, it turns out, was in his blood: His grandmother was mentally unstable, his mother was nearly psychotic and his sister and daughter had suffered severe mental breakdowns. As if that wasn’t enough, his father and wife died young, and one time his uncle slit his throat in front of him. Peter was actually the sane one in the family, or as it was known to people who weren’t in his family, “still crazier than a shit house rat.”
.. The only thing that seemed to calm him was making lists, a somewhat creepy hobby he’d had since childhood. When he retired from medicine at 61, he realized he might as well spend all day making one huge, all-encompassing list of all the things ever — so that’s exactly what he did.
The Success:
Twelve years later, at age 73, Peter Roget published his giant list of words as a book, Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases … otherwise known as “the thesaurus.”