Self-help author Marianne Williamson argued to Anderson Cooper that she was not anti-science when the CNN host challenged her past positions on antidepressants and mental health.
“If you’re on an antidepressant, you’re not numbing your pain. You’re actually trying to feel again, no?” Cooper asked in a Thursday interview on CNN.
“If you’re on an antidepressant, you’re not numbing your pain. You’re actually trying to feel again.”@AndersonCooper challenges presidential candidate @marwilliamson on her record on mental health, vaccines, and antidepressants.https://t.co/UQD6KuCHWh pic.twitter.com/1jeh6xLuiK
— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) August 2, 2019
The 67-year-old author responded by talking about a “normal spectrum of human despair.” Williamson claimed religion and spirituality once helped people navigate such emotions, but now the “baton sort of passed” to modern psychotherapy and pharmaceutical drugs.
Cooper fired back that she had called “clinical depression” a “scam” in the past until backtracking.
“What I believe is that when we go through these issues of normal human despair… there is value sometimes in feeling the sadness, in feeling the dark night of the soul,” Williamson explained. “We have lost our sense that sadness is part of life.”
She said she “questioned sometimes” how clinical depression is “looked at.” She called her past “scam” comment both “glib” and “wrong,” but nevertheless maintained that she thought antidepressants were overprescribed.
Cooper then pointed to an article she shared after the death of Robin Williams that was written by someone affiliated with the Church of Scientology.
“This idea that I’m some Tom Cruise about antidepressants — I’m not and I never have been,” Williamson protested.
The presidential hopeful is currently polling in 18th place in the Democratic primary race at under half-a-percent support, according to RealClearPolitics.
