Tag Archives: depression

“For survival reasons, I must spread globally”

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Reading Trippy by Ernesto Londono for the Telegraph

Ernesto Londoño’s enviable reputation as a journalist was forged in the conflict zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2017 he landed his dream job as the New York Times Brazil bureau chief, with a roving brief, talented and supportive colleagues, and a high-rise apartment in Rio de Janeiro.

When, not long after, he nearly-accidentally-on-purpose threw himself off his balcony, he knew he was in serious emotional trouble.

It was more than whimsy that led him to look for help at a psychedelic retreat in the Amazon hamlet of Mushu Inu, a place with no running water, where the shower facility consisted of a large tub guarded by a couple of tarantulas. He had seen what taking antidepressant medications had done for acquaintances in the US military (nothing good), and thought to write at first hand about what, in the the US, has become an increasingly popular alternative therapy: drinking ayahuasca tea.

Ayahuasca is prepared by boiling chunks of an Amazonian vine called Banisteriopsis caapi with the leaves of a shrubby plant called Psychotria viridis. The leaves contain a psychoactive compound, and the vines stop the drinker from metabolising it too quickly. The experience that follows is, well, trippy.

By disrupting routine patterns of thought and memory processing, psychedelic trips offer depressed and traumatised people a reprieve from their obsessive thought patterns. They offer them a chance to recalibrate and reinterpret past experiences. How they do this is up to them, however, and this is why psychedelics are anything but a harmless recreational drug. It’s as possible to step out of a bad trip screaming psychotically at the trees as it is to emerge, Buddha-like, from a carefully guided psychedelic experience. The Yawanawá people of the Amazon, who have effectively become global ambassadors for the brew (which, incidentally, they’ve only been making for a few hundred years) make no bones about its harmful potential. The predominantly western organisers of ayahuasca-fuelled tourist retreats are rather less forthcoming.

Psychedelics promise revolutionary treatments for PTSD. In the US, pharmaceutical researchers funded by government are attempting to subtract all the whacky, enjoyable and humane elements of the ayahuasca experience, and thereby distil a kind of aspirin for war trauma. It’s a singularly dystopian project, out to erase the affect of atrocities in the minds of those who might, thanks to that very treatment, be increasingly inclined to perpetrate them.

On one ayahausca webforum, meanwhile, the brew speaks to her counter-cultural acolytes. “If I don’t spread globally I will face extinction, similar to Humans,” a feminised ayahuasca cuppa proclaims. “For survival reasons, I must spread globally, while Humans must accept my sacred medicine to heal their afflicted soul.”

Londono has drunk the brew, if not the Kool-Aid, and says his ayahuasca experiences saved, if not his life, then at very least his capacity for happiness. He maintains a great affection for the romantics and idealists who he depicts in pursuit, according to their different lights, of the good and the healthful in psychedelic experience.

His own survey leads him from psychedelic “bootcamps” in the rainforest to upscale clinics in Costa Rica tending to the global one per cent, to US “churches”, who couch therapy as religious experience so that they can import ayahuasca and get around the strictures of the DEA. The most startling sections, for me, dealt with Santo Daime, a syncretic Brazilian faith that contrives to combine ayahuasca with a proximal Catholic liturgy.

Trippy is told, as much as possible, in the first person, through anecdote and memoir. Seeing the perils and the promise of psychedelic experience play out in Londono’s own mind, as he comes to terms over years with his own quite considerable personal traumas, is a privilege, though it brings with it moments of tedium, as though we were being expected to sit through someone’s gushing account of their cheese dreams. This — let’s call it the stupidity of seriousness — is a besetting tonal problem with the introspective method. William James fell foul of it in The Principles of Psychology of 1890, so it would be a bit rich of me to twit Londono about it in 2024.

Still, it’s fair to point out, I think, that Londono, an accomplished print journalist, is writing, day on day, for a readership of predominantly US liberals — surely the most purse-lipped and conservative readership on Earth. So maybe, with Trippy as our foundation, we should now seek out a looser, more gonzo treatment: one wild enough to handle the wholesale spiritual regearing promised by the psychedelics coming to a clinic, church, and holiday brochure near you.

 

“Crude to the point of vulgarity, judgmental in the extreme, and bitterly punitive”

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Reading The Age of Guilt by Mark Edmundson for New Scientist, 5 July 2023

In his Freudian analysis of what we might loosely term “cancel culture”, Mark Edmundson wisely chooses not to get into facile debates about which of the pioneering psychoanalyst’s ideas have or have not been “proved right”. What would that even mean? Psychology is not so much science as it is engineering, applying ideas and evidence to a purpose. Edmundson, an author and literary scholar, simply wants to suggest that Freud’s ideas might help us better understand our current cultural moment.

In the centre of Freud’s model of the personality sits the ego, the conscious bit of ourselves, the bit that thinks, and therefore is. Bracketing the ego are two components of the personality that are inaccessible to conscious awareness: the id, and the super-ego. The id is the name Freud gives to all those drives that promote immediate individual well-being. Fancy a sandwich? A roll in the hay? A chance to clout your rival? That’s your id talking.

Much later, in an attempt to understand why so many of his clients gave themselves such a hard time (beating themselves up over trivia, calling themselves names, self-harming) Freud conceived the super-ego. This is the bit of us that warns us against misbehaviour, and promotes conformity to social norms. Anyone who’s spent time watching chimpanzees will understand why such machinery might evolve in an animal as ultra-social as Homo sapiens.

Casual descriptions of Freud’s personality model often characterise the super-ego as a sort of wise uncle, paternalistically ushering the cadet ego out of trouble.

But this, Edmundson says, is a big mistake. A power that, in each of us, watches, discovers and criticizes all our intentions, is not a power to be taken lightly.

Edmundson argues that key cultural institutions evolved not just to regulate our appetites; they also provide direction and structure for the super-ego. A priest might raise an eyebrow at your gluttony; but that same priest will relieve you of your self-hatred by offering you a simple atonement: performing it wipes your slate clean. Edmundson wonders what, in the absence of faith, can corral and direct the fulminations of our super-ego — which in this account is not so much a fount of idealism, and more a petulant, unrelenting and potentially life-threatening martinet, “crude to the point of vulgarity, judgmental in the extreme, and bitterly punitive.”

The result of unmet super-ego demands is sickness. “The super-ego punishes the ego and turns it into an anxious, frightened creature, a debilitatingly depressed creature, or both by turns,” Edmundson explains, and quotes a Pew Research study showing that, from 2007 to 2017, the percentage of 12-to-17 year olds who have experienced a major depressive episode in the past year rose from 8 percent to 13 percent. Are these severely depressed teenagers “in some measure victims of the wholesale cultural repudiation of Freud”?

Arguments from intuition need a fairly hefty health warning slapped on them, but I defy you not to find yourself nodding along to more than a few of Edmundson’s philippics: for instance, how the internet became our culture’s chief manifestation of the super-ego, its loudest users bearing all the signs of possession, “immune to irony, void of humour, unforgiving, prone to demand harsh punishments.”

Half a century ago, the anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote a book, The Denial of Death, that hypothesised all manner of connections between society, behaviour and consciousness. Its informed and closely argued speculations inspired a handful of young researchers to test his ideas, and thereby revolutionise the field of experimental psychology. (An excellent book from 2015, The Worm at the Core, tells their story.)

In a culture that’s growing so pathologically judgmental, condemnatory, and punitive, I wonder if The Age of Guilt can perform the same very valuable trick? I do hope so.