Bipolar Expeditions (53 page)

C
ONCLUSION

1. Psychologists have studied “depressive realism,” a pattern in which, under experimental conditions, depressed people judge their control over events more accurately than nondepressed people do (Teasdale and Barnard,
Affect, Cognition and Change).
Recent evidence has complicated the picture by showing that depressed people take fewer factors into account when assessing their ability to control experimental events. On these findings, depressed people actually make less accurate judgments than those who are not depressed (Msetfi et al., “Depressive Realism and Outcome Density Bias in Contingency Judgments”). These results are intriguing, but the experimental situation (turning on a lightbulb that only works part of the time) is a long way from the larger issues I am considering, such as assessing the quality of social life in the United States.

2. Huxley,
Brave New World,
78.

3. Ibid., 92.

4. Stevenson, “Aftermath,” 4.

5. Ibid.

6. McManamy,
McMan's Depression and Bipolar Weekly.

7. Clark, “On the Brink of War.”

8. New York Times Editorial, “The Best-Selling Post-Mortem.”

9. Abelson, “Bad News Bulls.”

10. Ibid.

11. In 2003, the New School in New York City ran a public relations campaign on billboards for the continuous education they provide, lest one fall behind in the Darwinist struggle for survival. In 2005 Microsoft rolled out a print and Web media campaign for upgrades to Office 2003. The ads depict dinosaur-headed humans who begin to realize that they have been working in a bygone era left behind by others who have already evolved with the help of the upgrade. See
http://www.microsoft.com/office/evolve/default.mspx
(accessed June 20, 2005).

12. Greenhouse, “The Mood at Work,” provides statistics on the level of anger, pessimism, and anxiety among Americans who are working, in contrast to the characteristic ebullience of the 1990s.

13. Brooks, “More Than Money,” A23.

14. Ibid.

15. This passage is often misunderstood because of the misleading translation in the popular “Gerth and Mills” English edition of Weber's writings: “An unsere Arbeit gehen und der ‘Forderung des Tages' gerecht warden—menschlich sowohl wie beruflich. Die aber ist schlicht und einfach, wenn jeder den Dämon findet und ihm gehorcht, der seines Lebens Fäden halt” is translated there, “We shall set to work and meet the ‘demands of the day,' in human relations as well as in our vocation. This, however, is plain and simple, if each finds and obeys the demon who holds the fibers of his very life” (Weber,
From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology,
156). There is a more accurate translation in Weber,
The Vocation Lectures:
“We must go about our work and meet ‘the challenges of the day'—both in our human relations and our vocation. But that moral is simple and straightforward if each person finds and obeys the daemon that holds the threads of
his
life” (31; emphasis in original).

16. Martha Nussbaum provides a rich gloss for the Greek concept of eudaimonia (her preferred spelling). Eudaimonia is “human flourishing, a complete human life,” and refers to everything a person imbues with intrinsic value
(Upheavals of Thought,
32).

17. Doris Chang usefully surveys the politics of the process by which the supplement came into being in “An Introduction to the Politics of Science.”

18. See Orr, “The Ecstasy of Miscommunication,” 161. See also Orr's innovative history and ethnography of “the psychic life of panic”
(Panic Diaries).

19. Safire, “Beware ‘Animal Spirits.'”

20. Brooks, “A Nation of Grinders,” 16.

21. Ibid.

22. The subject would take me too far afield, but this description of mania overlaps in some ways with the “pathological narcissist,” a personality type that has been described as a radical conformist who paradoxically sees himself as an outlaw.
i
ek,
Looking Awry,
102–3.

23. Serres, “The Geometry of the Incommunicable,” 52.

24. Foucault, “Madness, the Absence of Work.” In Michel Serres's words, subjects would arise “who can finally speak of their own country, conceive of their own domain” (“The Geometry of the Incommunicable,” 51–52). For Foucault, this would alter the “precarious … relationship of our culture to this truth about itself, far away and inverted, which it discovers over and over in madness” (“Madness, the Absence of Work,” 98).

25. Foucault, “Madness, the Absence of Work,” 99.

26. Ibid. Emphasis in original.

27. I am indebted to Jackie Orr for this point.

28. Another way to approach this issue is to work toward a more effective definition of mental illness. Jerome Wakefield develops this approach as a way of clarifying the sometimes muddled definitions of “disorder” and “disability” in the DSM. These definitions are, I would agree, badly in need of clarification, in particular, as Wakefield persuasively argues, to clarify what “dysfunction” means. The problems that concern me in this book are quite different, however, and would persist no matter how mental illnesses were redefined. As long as “dysfunction” in the definition of mental illness was still connected to irrationality, the social processes I describe—in which the rational and irrational are inextricably intertwined—retain their relevance. For specific analysis of problems with the definition of social phobia, see Wakefield, “Disorder as Harmful Dysfunction.” Wakefield, Horwitz, and Schmitz, “Are We Overpathologizing the Socially Anxious?”

29. Chaffin,
Manic Depression.

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