RC:
For 10 years or longer, my weekday routine as a psychiatrist had been constant: write mornings, see patients afternoons. With the publication of my book Listening to Prozac in 1993, new elements were added: travel and public appearances.
One question followed me from lecture to lecture, from talk show to talk show, bookstore to bookstore. Because the question was so automatic, so predictable, it took me months to appreciate how peculiar it was.
At a book signing, I might give a short introduction to this or that aspect of Listening to Prozac, discussing workplace pressures to remain upbeat, say, and the ethics of using medications in response. What I spoke about seemed not to matter. Inevitably someone would ask: "What if so-and-so had taken Prozac?" The candidates for drug treatment were drawn from a short roster of tortured 19th-century artists and writers. Friedrich Nietzsche and Edgar Allan Poe made frequent appearances.
My response was perfunctory - a quick review of theories of art and neurosis. I resented the joking distraction from issues I had raised. I did not treat the what if question as I did others. I did not attend to it, puzzle over it, take it to heart.
And then one day I did. The setting was a professional meeting in Copenhagen, in 1995. At home, as the Prozac book's popularity grew, my standing among my colleagues fell - or so I feared. With a few thousand copies sold, a man is all right. With hundreds of thousands of sales, it is another matter. I was a popularizer, an opportunist who had made his way on the backs of others, the real researchers. This apprehension was a matter of hypersensitivity, of mild paranoia - although when a book succeeds, there are always belated "debunking" reviews, to feed an author's insecurity. Speaking invitations poured in, and still I thought I heard snickering from the back row.
But in Scandinavia! There I was a prophet with honour, like Jerry Lewis in France. The Finns were among the first to translate Listening to Prozac. Now it was being put into Swedish, with an introduction by the most eminent biological psychiatrist in Northern Europe, Marie Åsgard. The Swedes had persuaded the Scandinavian Society for Psychopharmacology to invite me as the keynote speaker at their annual meeting.
My hosts had proposed the topic "Myths and Realities" about antidepressants. The core of the talk would concern an orthodoxy I considered mythical, the one that said antidepressants treat only depression. I wanted to review evidence that the drugs might influence personality traits in people with no mental illness at all.
I spent a pleasant afternoon in Copenhagen on my own. The morning of my presentation arrived. I was in serious company - laboratory and clinical researchers. The practising doctors had seen effects similar to the ones I had described in my book, dramatic responses to medication. I felt myself on solid ground, the honoured guest.
I launched into my talk. The audience was attentive, applause polite. A hearty fellow stood up to ask the first question. He had a smile that was familiar to me, from other audiences. His question was: "So, Dr. Kramer, what would have happened if Kierkegaard had taken Prozac?"
Of course, in Copenhagen the suffering artist would be Søren Kierkegaard. Who else? He is the most famous Dane, give or take Hans Christian Andersen. Certainly Kierkegaard is the Dane best known for his melancholy, if you understand Hamlet to be fiction. Danes know Kierkegaard the way we know Mark Twain or Henry David Thoreau - perhaps more intimately. I was once told that when Danish children are sullen, parents will scold them, "Don't be such a Søren!"
Kierkegaard is part of what had brought me to Copenhagen, what had made the invitation appealing. I read Kierkegaard when I was young. My college roommate and I plowed through Either/Or together, after my roommate's mother died. She had lived with Hodgkin's disease for almost the whole of her son's life and had never told him, for fear of blighting his childhood. That was like something out of Kierkegaard - self-sacrifice so radical as to be disturbing.
On the flight across the Atlantic, I had browsed in a paperback version of Kierkegaard's Diaries. How grim they are. Kierkegaard describes self-loathing, pessimism, dread, isolation, guilt, and anomie. He writes of wanting to shoot himself. Kierkegaard complains of a "primitive melancholy ... a huge dowry of distress." He writes, "My whole past life was in any case so altogether cloaked in the darkest melancholy, and in the most profoundly brooding of misery's fogs, that it is no wonder I was as I was." And then: "How terrible to have to buy each day, each hour - and the price varies so!" And again: "The sad thing with me is that the crumb of joy and reassurance I slowly distill in the painstakingly dyspeptic process of my thought-life I use up straightaway in just one despairing step."
On my arrival in Copenhagen, I had taken a walk to the Kierkegaard statue, in the garden of the Danish Royal Library. For good measure, I sought out Kierkegaard's grave in the old central churchyard. The walks gave time and occasion to take the measure of the man. So when I heard Kierkegaard in the usual question, I was aware of a particular person. What if effective treatment had been available to this man, the one who pays a terrible price for each day and each hour?
That was how, standing before a group of friendly faces in a standard hotel conference room, I caught a glimmer of the problem with the what if challenge: The question had nothing to do with my talk and not much to do with my book. I had asked my listeners to consider medication's effects on people who meet no criteria for any illness. How did that presentation suggest Kierkegaard?
It can be inferred from the passage that the victim(s) of the 'mild paranoia' was/were
a.The researchers who claimed him to be a popularizer
b.The author's publishers
c.The author
d.The reviewers
Which of the following can most likely be inferred from the passage?a.The 'what if' question posed by the man from the audience in Sweden was an indicator that the man had doubts about the author's expertise.
b.His interest in Kierkegaard was one of the reasons for the author's acceptance of the invitation to speak in Sweden.
c.Jerry Lewis is a famous soothsayer from France.
d.The author was prone to challenge orthodoxies and expose them as popular myths.
The phrase "...if you understand Hamlet to be fiction" is used to meana.Hamlet was a creation of Kierkegaard who was a melancholic
b.Hamlet is also a well-known melancholic but he is fictitious
c.Hamlet is a semi-fictitious figure who is well known for melancholia
d.The author realized that the Danes were big fans of Shakespeare
According to the passage, which of the following statements about Kierkegaard is/are true?a.Kierkegaard was plagued by chronic depression, a bane passed on to him by his ancestors.
b. Kierkegaard paid a terrible price for keeping his sanity intact, each day and each hour.
c.Kierkegaard's depressing works had the potential to affect the reader's mind to the extent that they started behaving as Kierkegaard would.
d None of the above.
-CL Mock