00:00Peter D. Kramer. That's how I know you.
00:02Yes.
00:02Hi. Thank you for joining me.
00:05I always think of you with your full name as an author.
00:09Yes.
00:09Peter D. Kramer.
00:10Yes.
00:11So that's, you know, but I can call you Peter, I assume, right?
00:14Or do most people call you Doctor?
00:16This was a big thing with my second book.
00:18I had an editor who said there are no serious writers with middle initials.
00:23If you're going to be an author, drop the D.
00:25That is astonishing.
00:27F. Scott Fitzgerald.
00:28Well, that's not a middle, I guess.
00:29Yeah, yeah.
00:45I was in Denmark at a psychopharmacology conference,
00:51and I had been asked in bookstores, you know,
00:55what would happen if Van Gogh had taken Prozac?
00:58And I thought, seriously?
01:01Yes.
01:01You know, what if someone, you know, suicidal, deeply depressed?
01:07You know, what if, I mean, isn't that, what are we doing?
01:09This is a pharmacology conference.
01:11You know, what is our intention if it's not to ameliorate serious disorders?
01:17It's a weird question, right?
01:19Because it lacks empathy, right?
01:20To this, it's like, you care so much about Starry Night, you know what I'm saying?
01:24Right.
01:25Like Starry Night, and like, which likely lives on a magnet on your fridge, like, you know what I mean?
01:29This size.
01:29Are we going to titrate this, like, what amount of suffering is a good trade-off for Starry Night?
01:37Maybe part of the reason that there's still, while we do call it a disease, and we in some ways
01:42treat it as one,
01:43you know, behaviors associated with depression, I believe, and you can tell me we're wrong,
01:47but, you know, happen to have some overlap with things that we hold romantic, like, in the West or something,
01:54like, you know, pensive, alone.
01:56No, I mean, there's this wonderful history of melancholy and sort of sublimity, the people who were more sensitive
02:06and more perceptive, and there's sort of this periodic embracing of melancholy, which, of course, is easier to do
02:16if you can't do anything about it.
02:18Yes.
02:18I think the beauty of psychotherapy, pharmacology, whatever's gone on in the past hundred or more of the past 50
02:25years,
02:26is that we really can alter things that human beings could never alter.
02:31Right.
02:36To say something about depression, and this is a bit of a stump speech,
02:40the sort of modal depressed person is not a poet.
02:44It is a, you know, single mother who is underemployed, you know, married the wrong person,
02:52got less education than she should have gotten.
02:54This is a very destructive disorder to have, and it's one of the few chronic recurrent illnesses that starts very
03:04young,
03:05and then is just persistent.
03:07So it disturbs normal development repeatedly.
03:11Yeah.
03:11So that, you know, it's not really that we're mostly dealing with Van Gogh or Kierkegaard, whatever their, you know,
03:18diagnoses are.
03:19We're dealing with people who are just being dragged down and not let up at all.
03:26Yeah.
03:26You know, it's interesting, because the, for this particular series, and since we're talking about depression, you know,
03:33I'm literally attempting to romanticize my own depression, like put it on film, you know what I mean?
03:39Uh-huh.
03:39Although I have to say, I think you do a good job in the book.
03:42You know, I think it's clear that you're bearing a burden.
03:47Yeah.
03:47That you recognize that other people who might be bearing that burden are, you know, need something, a little something.
03:58In therapy, I think that it's possible to be charmed by people's suffering.
04:03Oh, this is huge, okay?
04:05Sorry, I just have to break in, okay?
04:07Do it.
04:07This was a huge insight, and I changed my approach in therapy as a patient, as a result.
04:11Yeah.
04:12Okay?
04:12Because, obviously, I used to go in there and, you know, do a, do a gorgeous 45 minutes.
04:18And they just really, really juice it up and make it quite philosophical.
04:21Yes.
04:22Okay?
04:22And this was the problem.
04:23Like, they sort of, I think they sort of saw me as like, you're doing fine.
04:26Like, like, you're doing fine.
04:28Like, you're, you're being interesting.
04:30Like, you know, you're, you're grappling with the, and then I would go home and be in, you know, a
04:34very, you know, inactive, uninteresting.
04:37So, I realized, you know, I don't feel like they're feeling that the situation is dire enough, okay?
04:44Because of me creating this salon hour with them.
04:47Right.
04:48Each week.
04:49And so then I actively brought down the charm and, like, tried to speak from how I felt when I
04:53would be at home.
04:54Right.
04:55And one of them would consistently fall asleep.
05:02Do you think that, just for, for my own flattery, do you think that, like, you know, you know, Freud
05:07or, or, you know, even better, maybe Jung, okay?
05:10Do you think, like, those guys, like, think I'm pretty fabulous?
05:12Like, do you know what I mean?
05:13Like, like, if I went in there, like, okay, like, I'm not that interested in, like, charming, like, you know,
05:17the average, like, fool.
05:18I, I, I think they, yeah.
05:18But do you think they'd be like, she's, she's, um, you know, old.
05:22No.
05:22Right.
05:23No.
05:23No.
05:24No, no.
05:24You don't, you, you see, you see.
05:26No.
05:26I think they would see conformity to that ideal as another form of resistance.
05:31You know what I mean?
05:32I think that there's no, there's no winning on that one.
05:39This has been How to Weep in Public today with Peter D. Kramer, author of Ordinarily Well and a few
05:47other books that you should check out.
05:50Sorry, I fucked up.
