What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [25]
Conclusion and evaluation. So the final principle of biological psychiatry is firmly in place: A massive body of research in the last ten years has shown that personality is heritable. Add this to the principles that mental illness is physical illness and that drugs change our emotions and mood, and you arrive at a powerful view of human nature.
Biological psychiatry, as a philosophy of mental illness, must be taken seriously. But I have three caveats—one for each principle.
First: That mental illness is physical illness has been demonstrated for only one mental illness—general paresis. The claims for schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, and manic-depression are plausible but unproven—no biochemical causes have yet been located. The claims for depression, anxiety, sexual problems, overweight, and post-traumatic stress disorder are merely part of an ideological agenda, with very modest evidence to back them up.
Second: The claim that mood and emotion are just brain chemistry and that to change you merely need the right drug must be viewed with skepticism. The basic drug discoveries to date warrant only modest enthusiasm. There are indeed drugs that alter mood for some—but not all—people. All of these drugs are cosmetic, however, and all of them produce unwanted side effects, some of which are awful.
Third: The claim that personality is inherited has strong evidence behind it. But, at most, personality is only partly genetic. The degree of heritability hovers below .50 for all personality traits (except for IQ, which may be around .75). Even by the most extreme estimates, at least half of personality is not inherited. This means that, at most, half of personality is fixed.23 The other half of personality comes from what you do and from what happens to you—and this opens the door for therapy and self-improvement.
Which half you can change and which you cannot is what the rest of this book is about.
PART TWO
Changing Your
Emotional Life: Anxiety,
Depression, and Anger
The mind is a city like London,
Smoky and populous: it is a capital
Like Rome, ruined and eternal,
Marked by the monuments which no one
Now remembers. For the mind, like Rome, contains
Catacombs, aqueducts, amphitheatres, palaces,
Churches and equestrian statues, fallen, broken or soiled.
The mind possesses and is possessed by all the ruins
Of every haunted, hunted generation’s celebration.
Delmore Schwartz, “The Mind Is an Ancient
and Famous Capital,” 1959
4
Everyday Anxiety
EVERY DAY WE EXPERIENCE, at least momentarily, three emotions we don’t like: anxiety, depression, and anger. These are the three faces of dysphoria—bad feeling. These same three common emotions, when out of control, cause most “mental illness.” When we experience one, we want to get rid of it. Indeed, that is their very point. In this chapter, I will discuss what you can and cannot change about anxiety. In later chapters in this part, I will discuss depression and anger. But before exploring the exorcising of these emotions, we should first ask what they are doing in your life in the first place.
There are two kinds of “wisdom to distinguish the one from the other” at issue here. One is what you can and cannot change about dysphoria—a central topic of this book. The other, however, comes first.
When should you not try changing? When should you listen to the message of your negative emotions, as uncomfortable as it may be, and change your external life rather than your emotional life?
Bad weather inside. People, by and large, are astonishingly attracted to the catastrophic interpretation of things. Not just “neurotics,” not just depressives, not just phobics, not just explosive personalities, but most of us, much of the time.
Goethe said that in his entire life he had only a couple of completely happy days. I am astonished that when my own life is going smoothly—work, love,