No Sympathy? No Problemos

Doctor to patient: I have good news and bad news -

the good news is that you are not a hypochondriac...

If you happen to be suffering from depression, don't be too surprised when your GP recommends MoodGym as the potential solution to all of your problems. Someone's gotta use this website. From the programme's welcome note:

Time to get started. Now that you know what to expect from MoodGYM, let’s meet some of the characters who are at MoodGYM who are also experimenting with changing their mood. Click on the thumbnails below to learn about the characters in MoodGYM. 

Meet ELLE who is gorgeous looking, talented, good at work, attractive to men but feels like a fraud. Feels one day, people are going to find out that she really is stupid, untalented, unintelligent, emotionally void, ugly etc. It is only a matter of time. Maybe we are all a bit like ELLE sometimes. 

JANE is positive, generous, but gets fazed in social situations and is sensitive to criticism. Maybe we are all a bit like JANE sometimes. 

Meet CREEPY ANGRY… Actually, on second thoughts, let’s not meet CREEPY ANGRY just yet. He really has problems. But then again, maybe we can all be like CREEPY ANGRY sometimes. 

Though my absolute favourite has to be

NOPROBLEMOS, one of those people who are genuinely happy, self fulfilled, loves life, is content. Maybe we are all a bit like NOPROBLEMOS sometimes.

Clearly, MoodGym have taken 'depressed' to mean 'stupid'. And it makes sense, too, since what else could someone suffering from depression possibly desire more than to be patronised?

Perhaps it's because experience underwrites sympathy and most people have never experienced mental illness that such a great volume of 'reading materials' on the topic are complete and utter crap. Next we're going to be told that depression is God's way of herding back the Prodigal Son.

And as if depression wasn't punishment enough, in comes CBT. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy is about as engaging as filing in a visa application except more boring and you don't get to go on a trip at the end of it. "Have you ever thought about hurting yourself?" "Are you entering this country to engage in terrorist activities?"

If nothing else, the fact alone that it forces upon the depressed regular encounters with the monolith of institutionalised depression that is the NHS therapy services - would suffice in undoing any good a sober analysis of one's state of mind might otherwise have done. Why be surprised that 'depressed people are more likely than average to be users of recreational drugs'? By comparison, drug dealers are charming, well-rounder characters with many deep and sophisticated insights into the state and affairs of the world. If one were rich, one would surely have to do the sensible thing and treat one's insecurities with cocaine.

The trouble with things like depression is that we have no reliable way of measuring it. And its symptoms are so subtle, so pervasive, so endemically intertwined with one's own personality that it's really quite hard to tell at what point you're no longer depressed and you're just being a dick.

Let us hope the Human Brain Project goes well. In the meantime give it enough self-help literature and medication and cocaine - we'll all be a little like No Problemos one day...

Great Men

If there is a God, Cardinal de Richelieu

will have much to answer for.
If not...well, he had a successful life

Pope Urban VIII,

upon learning of Cardinal Richelieu's death

Hubris, exacerbated pride - an old trope of which art never seems to tire: its critique, its analysis, its exaltation. Hubris is what comes to mind when at the end of a piano excerpt music Professor Craig Wright exclaims: 'How long did it take old Chopin to think that up, do you suppose? Two seconds? Three seconds of white-hot inspiration? I'm sixty-four years old and I haven't had one second of genius in my entire life.'

Of course, I think, I'm twenty-five years old and I haven't had one either. I am Napoleon III. My talents fall short of my ambitions. I am incessantly dominated by and hopelessly sensitive to the tide of public approval. I lack an overall strategic plan and a vision of what I wish to accomplish. I am undecided and conflicted and at the mercy of aggrieving, unremitting whims.

Confidence is the prerequisite, it seems, of any great man. But is confidence an intellectual or emotional affair? I am in awe at Hitler's relentless determination to achieve power. Despite spending his youth as a tramp, despite the failing of a premature putsch, despite a comprehensive majority always eluding him (at least for as long as elections were unadulterated), he soldiered on, he remained convinced he was on the right track. But he was a fanatic. How could a sane and thinking person ever turn self-righteousness into self-determination? I am Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov - appalled at my inability to bridge the gap between my skill (or lack thereof), my philosophy and my ambition. 

More intriguing figures are those of the original Napoleon, Richelieu and Otto von Bismark. Perhaps raw power (both political and military) may ferment into self-assurance just as effectively as the thundering of a fanatic's mind. How tragic to be devoured by an unfulfilled, yet burning sense of mission. Napoleon III was a revolutionary without a revolution. Was this an inherent consequence of his biology? An accident of history? Is it possible for deliberate thought to reign over the herd of sorrows and shape one's personality, one's choices and ultimately - one's achievements?

Then again, as Henry Kissinger would put it, what's one more high hope and ideal lost to the 'fragility of human foresight'? We can't all be Great Men.

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