What Sheila and the other experimenters wanted to know was: Would there be a difference between how many times and how hard the actor was zapped, depending on which reason he had given for his depression? It turns out that you were more likely to hurt somebody if you believed their mental illness was the result of their biochemistry than if you believed it was the result of what had happened to them in life. Believing depression was a disease didn’t reduce hostility. In fact, it increased it. This experiment—like so much of what I had learned—hints at something. For a long time, we have been told there are only two ways of thinking about depression. Either it’s a moral failing—a sign of weakness—or it’s a brain disease. Neither has worked well in ending depression, or in ending its stigma. But everything I had learned suggests that there’s a third option—to regard depression as largely a reaction to the way we are living. This way is better, Marc said, because if it’s an innate biological disease, the most you can hope for from other people is sympathy—a sense that you, with your difference, deserve their big-hearted kindness. But if it’s a response to how we live, you can get something richer: empathy—because it could happen to any of us. It’s not some alien thing. It’s a universal human source of vulnerability. The evidence suggests Marc is right—looking at it this way makes people less cruel, to themselves and to other people.
The final passage I’ll be posting from this book. One thing that stood out to me about this passage was how easily our attitude towards others could change based on our beliefs.
In this case, believing that someone’s mental health issues could be caused by internal biochemistry issues innate to them would result in us treating them more harshly. Whereas when we think that its due to environmental factors, we tend to be less hostile.
Logically, we shouldn’t be treating people better or worse in either situations. However, the fact that we do so is when believing depression results from environmental factors is that such “misfortunes” could have easily happened to ourselves. And while the truth lie somewhere in between, believing that mental health issues results from things that happen to us will enable us to empathise more deeply and be kinder.
