The Doping of the American Mind
PODHORETZ, JOHN
The Doping of the American Mind Robert Cohen's satirical tale of how we drug ourselves silly. BY JOHN PODHORETZ Since the publication in 1993 of Peter Kramer's Listening to Prozac, innumerable...
...BY JOHN PODHORETZ Since the publication in 1993 of Peter Kramer's Listening to Prozac, innumerable books have attempted to take the measure of a national psyche increasingly awash in mood-elevating pharmaceuticals...
...Better to be Bonnie than Ian Ogelvie, who longs for human connection but cannot quite manage it...
...Cohen's point is that clutter is life...
...I've been on Wellbutrin and Cytomel for about 2 months...
...The chief researcher tells his students, "In ten years—five—we'll be living in a world . . . where the biology of sleep and wakefulness is regularly manipulated through chemical means, with effects as revolutionary in the spheres of work and leisure as was the introduction of electrical light...
...Fantastic dreams that never end," he says...
...Elsewhere in Cambridge, pharmaceutical researchers are developing a medication called Dodabulax, which seems the answer to Bonnie's prayers...
...What purpose was served, she wondered, in keeping her apart...
...Her four-year-old sees it happening: "Lately she didn't care so much about what they ate, or how often they took baths, or what the teachers had said about what they'd done in school that day, or any of the usual things she worried about...
...Though I hear it causes lower bowel problems...
...The reality of the SSRI drugs is that they lift psychic boulders from the crippled backs of the clinically depressed, and it's impossible to argue that such pain should be endured simply because human beings had no choice but to endure it in the millennia before these substances were discovered...
...Dodabulax works its magic on Bonnie immediately...
...Bonnie lives in the whirlwind...
...But while Ian's life is as Spartan as Bonnie's is chaotic, it is equally unsatisfying: "There were times he did not so much inhabit his life as observe it under glass, finding his every movement obvious and reactive, significant not of itself but of some larger, unknowable force that lay beyond the frame of his will...
...She joins the clinical trial for Dodabulax as well...
...Why should we tolerate soul aches...
...Forget the planet," she thinks...
...That question is at the heart of Robert Cohen's novel Inspired Sleep...
...How long does it take before it really starts to work...
...Eyes shone, cheeks were flushed, the inner light of universal benevolence broke out on every face in happy, friendly smiles," Huxley writes of a populace so Contributing editor John Podhoretz last wrote for THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Bonnie joins an Internet "community" whose participants trade gossip and fears about brain drugs...
...She did that a lot...
...He has a ruthless satiric understanding of the woes of the overly educated, but also an imaginative sympathy for the anxieties arising from those woes...
...Because there are an awful lot of us in the middle, you know, who don't know what to call what we've got...
...It's you that needs saving...
...She could feel the city bobbing along on slow, invisible tides, sailing wistfully through the millennium...
...Every night, at 3:29 a.m., she wakes up and cannot get back to sleep: "Her neighbors' windows were dark...
...Was there to be a remedy for everything, then...
...Pepper...
...He can sit for hours and observe as a spider, doped with Dodab-ulax, weaves perfect, symmetrical webs, and two Siamese fighting fish dosed with the drug no longer feel the compulsion to fight...
...All she seemed to think about was lying down...
...thesis about Thoreau (whom she has come to despise), and trying to make do in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on $19,000 a year...
...Cohen has a rare sensibility that is equal parts comic and compassionate...
...The father has become a participant in the clinical trial of Dodabulax...
...This witty, wise, intellectually engaging, and altogether extraordinary book is set in the not-so-brave real world of serotonin inhibitors, Internet chat rooms devoted to anxiety, and doctors and patients who test the new drugs that promise relief from spiritual agony even as they raise fundamental questions about human nature...
...Which is supposed to be great stuff...
...Every time I take one I wind up getting lost...
...America seems to have embraced with unbridled enthusiasm the family of drugs that interrupt the journey of a neurological chemical called serotonin through the brain—so much so that cultural critics worry the nation is rapidly morphing into the dystopia of Aldous Huxley's frenzied imagining...
...I don't feel so good sometimes but other times I really am starting to think it's working...
...Gives you fantastic dreams...
...She is finally rested, full of new energy, more patient with her kids...
...I felt so good I didn't mind giving up my sex drive...
...We no longer tolerate headaches, throat aches, stomach aches...
...But when such a drug is no longer merely a literary trope but a practical possibility, it's not quite so easy to dismiss...
...He can only watch, mystified, as the world swirls around him...
...Still another: "Hi...
...All around her, people are finding refuge in psychopharmaceuticals...
...It's often overwhelming, but it's also far more interesting...
...But Bonnie resists medicating herself: "The whole millennial banquet of mood lighteners, breast swellers, hair growers, fat removers . . . —all the fast chemical solutions you could buy in a jar and swallow your way toward perfectibility—made her feel reticent and grudging, like a fat girl on a diet...
...Ian's spider stops spinning webs altogether...
...The dreams of a convict who receives triple doses begin slopping over into his waking life, leaving him "yellow, his bones scooped from his face as if by claws...
...The high-powered lawyer who introduced her to Dodabulax loses his ambition and his sex drive...
...Who says what's okay and what's pathology...
...Huxley may have thought that a drug offering instant and indiscriminate contentment was a horror beyond imagining...
...She tells the father of her younger son's preschool classmate, "I don't approve of shortcuts...
...And what effect will the drug have on Bonnie's pregnancy...
...The exhausted Bonnie drags herself through the day, rousing and feeding and fighting with her kids, teaching English literature to sullen and uncomprehending undergraduates, avoiding work on a Ph.D...
...The citizens of Huxley's Brave New World, you recall, would swallow a gram of the fictional drug "soma" at the first stirrings of anxiety...
...And Bonnie is one of the great characters in recent fiction: smart, obnoxious, self-pitying, and yet resilient...
...Inspired Sleep may sound depressing, but it is vivid and alive in a way few contemporary novels are...
...But for someone so burdened, sleep itself quickly becomes an addiction...
...Like so many who indulge in the fantasy of a chemical release from our ordinary troubles, Bonnie wishes to be delivered from the clutter of her life...
...I got turned on to this great new psy-chopharmacologist downtown who wants to put me on Effexor," writes one participant...
...The drug is administered to her by a brilliant young psychopharmacologist named Ian Ogelvie, who is gifted with a capacity for stillness that Bonnie lacks utterly...
...But to those not afflicted with crippling depression—to those suffering minor aches and sadnesses—Prozac and its progeny offer the fantasy that ordinary depression might be treated with an analgesic...
...Not anymore...
...Do you know what it's like to have nothing but deep sleep and fantastic dreams...
...For life itself...
...What are you going to do, go around treating everybody for everything...
...The woman who speaks those words to her psychopharmacologist is Bonnie Saks, a thirty-nine-year-old pregnant divorcee with a quick wit, sharp tongue, maxed-out credit cards, two young sons—and a really lousy case of insomnia...
...Cohen renders the political dynamics of Ian's research team, and Ian's blindness to them, with uncanny precision and detail...
...The vacant streets were silent...
...doped-up it is incapable of independent thought...
...Even when she was standing up she sort of looked like she was lying down...
...Her older son, enraged by his father's disappearing act, washes down 25 milligrams of Prozac a day with Dr...
...Bonnie cannot resist the lure...
...Another: "I have a history of depression and had tremendous results from Nortriptyline and Prozac for 4 yrs...
...about Mel Brooks's The Producers...
Vol. 6 • May 2001 • No. 32
