00:00Peter D. Kramer. That's how I know you.
00:02Yes.
00:03Hi. Thank you for joining me.
00:05I always think of you with your full name as an author.
00:09Yes.
00:09Peter D. Kramer.
00:11Yes.
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.
00:30I was in Denmark at a psychopharmacology conference, and I had been asked in bookstores, you know,
00:55what would happen if Van Gogh had taken Prozac?
00:58And I thought, seriously, you know?
01:01Yes.
01:01What if someone, you know, suicidal, deeply depressed, you know, what if, I mean, isn't that,
01:08what are we doing?
01:09This is a pharmacology conference.
01:11You know, what is our intention if it's not to ameliorate serious disorders?
01:18To treat.
01:18It'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.
01:24Like, Starry Night, and like, which likely lives on a magnet on your fridge, like, you
01:28know what I mean?
01:29This size.
01:30Are we going to titrate this?
01:30Like, what amount of suffering is a good trade-off for Starry Night?
01:34Yes.
01:37Maybe part of the reason that there's still, while we do call it a disease, and we in
01:41some ways treat it as one, you know, behaviors associated with depression, I believe, and
01:46you can tell me we're wrong, but, you know, happen to have some overlap with things that
01:50we hold romantic, like, in the West or something?
01:54Yeah.
01:55Like, you know, pensive, alone.
01:56No, I mean, there's this wonderful history of melancholy and sort of sublimity, the people
02:05who are more sensitive and more perceptive, and there's sort of this periodic embracing
02:12of melancholy, which of course is easier to do if 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
02:25the past fifty years, is that we really can alter things that human beings could never
02:30alter.
02:31Right.
02:36To say something about depression, and this is a bit of a stump speech, the sort of modal
02:41depressed person is not a poet.
02:44It is a, you know, single mother who is underemployed, you know, married the wrong person, got less
02:52education than she should have gotten.
02:54And this is a very destructive disorder to have, and it's one of the few chronic recurrent
03:02illnesses that starts very young and then is just persistent.
03:06So 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,
03:16whatever their, you know, diagnoses are, we're dealing with people who are just being dragged
03:24down 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
03:33about depression, you know, I'm literally attempting to romanticize my own depression,
03:37like 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.
03:46Yeah.
03:47And that you recognize that other people who might be bearing that burden are, you know,
03:53need something, a little something.
03:55Yeah.
03:57In therapy, I think that it's possible to be charmed by people's suffering.
04:03Oh.
04:03This is huge.
04:05Okay.
04:05Sorry, I just have to break in.
04:07Do it.
04:07Okay, just, this was a huge insight and I changed my approach in therapy as a patient,
04:11as a result.
04:12Yeah.
04:12Okay, because 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.
04:22Yes.
04:22Okay.
04:22And this was the problem, like they sort of, I think they sort of saw me as like,
04:26you're doing fine, like, like, you're doing fine, like, you're being interested,
04:30like, you know, you're grappling with the, and then I would go home,
04:33and be in, you know, a very, you know, inactive, uninteresting.
04:37So I realized, you know, I don't feel like they're feeling that the situation is dire enough,
04:44okay, because of me creating this salon hour with them each week.
04:48Right.
04:49And so then I actively brought down the charm and like tried to speak from how I felt
04:53when I would 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,
05:07Freud or, 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,
05:16like, you know, the average like fool.
05:18I, 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, no, no, 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
05:46and a few other books that you should check out.
05:50Sorry, I fucked up.
