Realistic approach to depression

As the maker of Prozac has launched a massive advertising campaign and is expanding its market to include children, I want people in Bangor and the surrounding area, where I spent summers growing up, to know there is an answer to depression at last.

Eli Siegel, the great American poet and philosopher who founded the education Aesthetic Realism in 1941, understood the cause of all mental trouble and the beautiful, scientific solution. I know with the conviction of my life that Aesthetic Realism is the knowledge that can end depression completely, because it understands its cause — contempt, “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.”

Contempt is very ordinary, like looking down on how someone dresses. But the false superiority we get from contempt always makes us ashamed and we punish ourselves for it. The deepest desire of every person, Aesthetic Realism teaches, is to like the world on an honest basis. This is the one way we can truly like ourselves.

In his lecture, “Mind and Questions,” Eli Siegel explains: “Life is a constant interaction between a self that wants to be entirely alone and not care for anything, and a self that is as friendly as the sunshine over a large city, wants to be nice to everybody.”

This described me. In high school, I was lively, nice to everybody, but also conceited. In my mind I compared myself to other girls and felt superior to them all. I envied Joanne who had traveled to Europe, but I told myself I was more earthy and rugged. When Marlene got better grades, I thought, “She’s got brains but she’s not smart and cool like me.” I felt the more flaws I found in others, the better I was.

But I didn’t know why, if I was so smart, cool and deep, I hated myself so much. Nothing I heard from the psychiatrist I went to changed this. And what the psychologist I saw at college told me — that other students wore defensive masks I was too sensitive to maintain — only added to my contempt. In my sophomore year, I had an acute anxiety attack and was given tranquilizers. I thank God the next year I began studying Aesthetic Realism, taught in New York City in public seminars and individual consultations by a faculty of consultants — and I met the true explanation of mind!

In my first Aesthetic Realism consultation, when I told my consultants what had happened the year before, they explained: “Aesthetic Realism says every person has an ethical unconscious… If you choose to see the world in an unfair way, your own ethical unconscious is critical of you and you are against yourself. This is where Aesthetic Realism differs from other ways of seeing self, which say we feel bad because there are standards imposed on us by the outside world which we don’t meet… You were ashamed because you weren’t meeting your own demands.” For the first time, I saw there was something I could really respect myself for — a demand coming from myself that I be fair to the world. And I learned that the world can honestly be liked because it has a structure that is beautiful — the oneness of opposites. For instance, Mount Katahdin, which I loved, with its lofty peak rising from a solid base, was a magnificent relation of high and low — opposites I needed to make sense of in myself. I began to see the world had so much in it that I could get great pleasure being fair to including the depths of people, objects, trees, music, biology and so much more! That consultation was 25 years ago. Since then, I have never been depressed again.

In recent years there have been many firsthand accounts of depression and the attempts to treat it, including through drugs. One of these is Elizabeth Wurtzel’s 1994 book, “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America,” published when she was 27 and on Prozac for six years.

This book shows how unscientific and ill-equipped mental practitioners are in dealing with people’s lives. For instance, when Elizabeth’s therapist gives her a diagnosis — atypical depression” — she says she never bothered to tell her before, because “there isn’t any reason to draw the symptoms of a depression into a particular category unless a therapist is about to prescribe an antidepressant.” “Enter Prozac, and suddenly I have a diagnosis,” Wurtzel wrote. “Which seems backward, but much less so later on, when I find that this is a typical course of events in psychiatry, that the discovery of a drug to treat, say, schizophrenia, will tend to result in many more patients being diagnosed as schizophrenics.” This is horrible! Mental practitioners do not understand mind or the cause of mental illness. Instead, they prescribe drugs. According to the research firm IMS America Ltd., 28 million adult Americans took antidepressants like Prozac in 1996, and $2.36 billion worth of Prozac was sold that year. With psychiatry as middleman, drug companies are making big profits from the suffering of people. From the depths of my heart, I feel for people who are being treated this way. They deserve to know Aesthetic Realism explains and can end depression.

“The big question about Prozac or any drug is this: Does it really have a person in a more just relation to the world — or is it a managing of the world, a trick to evade that justice which we deeply demand of ourselves and without the giving of which we shall never feel at ease?” wrote Ellen Reiss, the class chairman of Aesthetic Realism, in her definitive commentary in TRO #1089. “Chemistry can certainly affect emotions. But what needs to be studied too is whether the purposes we have affect the chemistry of our bodies… Through injustice — wanting to manipulate, conquer, lessen the world — we dislike ourselves. The ethical cause-and-effect is beautiful and inescapable, and no pill will change it. A pill may mask temporarily the ethics of self, but cannot take it away.

“It is the self’s grandeur that it was made to see justly a whole world other than itself — a world of happenings, objects, human beings, words. Through justice to that world, we become intelligent, imaginative, alive, happy, proud.” This great knowledge is taught in a wide curriculum of classes, public seminars and individual consultations in person and by telephone, worldwide, at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, a not-for-profit educational foundation, 141 Greene St., New York, NY 10012, or calling 212 77-4490, online at ww.aestheticrealism.org.

Sally Ross, a New York City high school biology teacher for 18 years, has written on the value of Aesthetic Realism for education, the family and the economy for publications in New York, Connecticut, Ohio and New Jersey.