What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [2]
The negative emotions and the negative personality traits have very strong biological limits, and perhaps the best science and practice will ever do with the approaches I review in this book is to encourage people to live in the best part of their set range of psychological symptoms. Think about Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, both likely unipolar depressives. They were both enormously productive human beings who dealt with their “black dogs” and functioned beautifully even when very depressed.
So here is my prescription for how to use this book optimally: If you or someone you are close to has symptoms of a mental disorder, you will be able to find here candid and tough-minded recommendations for what specific psychotherapy or what medications are likely to help and the degree to which they are likely to help. But these will not be curative. Many of the symptoms will recur, even if they are so ameliorated. An old-fashioned virtue must be coupled to these interventions. It is called courage: the courage to understand your psychological problems and manage them so as to function well in spite of them. When you couple courage with the interventions that I now review, you may break the 65 percent barrier.
—Martin Seligman
Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, September 2006
1* Kirsch, I., Moore, T., Scoboria, A. & Nicholls, S. (2002). The Emperor’s New Drugs: An Analysis of Antidepressant Medication Data Submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Prevention & Treatment, July 15-02.htm http://jour-nals.apa.org/prevention/volume5/toc-jul15-02.htm.
2* Pinker, S. The Blank Slate. (New York: Viking, 2002)
PART ONE
Biological Psychiatry
vs. Psychotherapy and
Self-Improvement
1
What Changes?
What Doesn’t Change?
TWO WORLDVIEWS are in collision. On the one hand, this is the age of psychotherapy and the age of self-improvement. Millions are struggling to change: We diet, we jog, we meditate. We adopt new modes of thought to counteract our depressions. We practice relaxation to curtail stress. We exercise to expand our memory and to quadruple our reading speed. We adopt draconian regimes to give up smoking. We raise our little boys and girls to androgyny. We come out of the closet or we try to become heterosexual. We seek to lose our taste for alcohol. We seek more meaning in life. We try to extend our life span.
Sometimes it works. But distressingly often, self-improvement and psychotherapy fail. The cost is enormous. We think we are worthless. We feel guilty and ashamed. We believe we have no willpower and that we are failures. We give up trying to change.
Trudy, like tens of millions of Americans, is desperate because she believes, quite incorrectly, that she is a failure. She finds herself even worse off after ten years of trying everything to lose weight.
Trudy weighed 175 pounds when she graduated from Brown a decade ago. Four times since, she has slimmed to under 125: Weight Watchers, Nutri-System, six months under the care of a private behavior therapist, and, last year, Optifast. With each regime the weight came off quickly, if not painlessly. Each time the fat returned, faster and more of it. Trudy now weighs 195 and has given up.
In its faith that we can change anything, the self-improvement movement expects Trudy to succeed in her fight against fat, even though she is such an obvious loser in the weight game. On the other hand, there is a view that expects Trudy to fail. For this is not only the age of self-improvement and therapy, this is the age of biological psychiatry. The human genome will be nearly mapped before the millennium is over. The brain systems underlying sex, hearing, memory, left-handed-ness, and sadness are now known. Psychoactive drugs—external agents—quiet our