Marianne Williamson may be a long-shot candidate for the White House, but while she has the spotlight, she’s got some valuable things to say.
A self-help author, Williamson is a little kooky, and she gives off a serious “let me read your tea leaves” vibe. When it comes to the issue of holistic health, though, her recent comments were spot on.
On Friday, Williamson told BuzzFeed News’ AM to DM that doctors overprescribe antidepressants, issuing them not just for mental illness but also for cases of “normal human despair.”
“The 20s can be very hard. They’re not a mental illness. Divorce can be very difficult, losing a loved one, someone that you know died, someone left in a relationship and you’re heartbroken, that’s very painful, but it’s not a mental illness,” Williamson said. “You had a professional failure, you lost your job, you went bankrupt. Those things are very difficult, but they’re not a mental illness.”
Those who take medication for depression might initially take offense at her comments, but she wasn’t discounting real mental illness. Williamson added that “clearly there are medical conditions for which psychotherapeutic drugs have been and continue to be very helpful in people’s lives, and I think that’s true with clinical depression as well.”
Two things can be true at once: Some people with mental illness don’t seek much-needed medication because of the stigma surrounding it or the belief that they can will it away. At the same time, many people take medication for conditions they should treat holistically, not with drugs.
Like pain, sadness can be a signal that something is wrong. Aldous Huxley’s dystopian masterpiece, Brave New World, shows what happens when people self-medicate to avoid suffering. By the end of the novel, one of the main characters gets fed up, choosing not to take the “soma” drugs that everyone pops like candy and demanding the right to be unhappy.
When I talked to Nathan Schlueter, a philosophy professor at Hillsdale College, about the book, he told me that “unhappiness” is not what the character seeks, but real, complete happiness.
“I think what he’s really saying is, ‘I choose discomfort, insecurity, etc. as a condition for a more noble or humane kind of happiness,'” Schlueter said. “That is, ‘I see my dignity as really being realized in a way in which suffering is going to be a part of that happiness.’ What he’s really saying is, ‘I’m going to choose a deeper kind of happiness than the one offered here.’”
Sometimes suffering is necessary for growth or appreciating moments of joy. Again, this doesn’t mean that certain people don’t need antidepressants to correct chemical imbalances and return their lives to normalcy. But the opioid crisis didn’t develop because of proper use of prescription drugs. It grew because millions of Americans sought to replace therapy or religion or self-reflection with medication.
Williamson is right; not every experience with adversity merits medication. Suffering is part of the human experience, and the paradoxical truth is that at times, we become happier by learning to embrace it.
