I have limitations. That makes me sad.

on depression

XXX finally joined FB, so I messaged him your post to get his highly qualified opinion (he's currently chief resident of psychiatry at XXX General Hospital).

Here goes:

Out of the erudite arguments of the post, I emphasise two things:
1) "we don't know what depression is..."

Depression is an overdetermined, multifactorial illness. There are probably a hundred different pathophysiologic conditions that are lumped together under the name depression. Kind of like how for what we call snow, the Eskimos have many more words. So it makes sense that any treatment for "depression" will treat only a limited percentage of users, and that the data for its efficacy will be controversial and mixed. I have seen antidepressants fail miserably. I've also seen them, and other related meds, literally wake people from the dead. I understand that human beings, and their biopsychosocial illnesses, defy any simple explanation or treatment.

2) Treating a psychological condition with medication is also one way of ascribing "meaning" to the condition. It medicalizes the condition; it pharmacologizes it. As you mentioned, it quantifies it on a scale of milligrams of drug. For many, having a medication validates that they are truly suffering--and that seems to be a response to a societal indifference to suffering we are all occasionally guilty of, whether you attribute it to the breakdown of the extended family, or breakdown of the tight-knit local community, or our generation of "narcissism combined with nihilism" as Al Gore put it. Depression is at its base a loss of hope--and meaning is the antidote to hopelessness. Sometimes a pill is both meaningful, and efficacious...

Enid Roach

I have, however, found the time to read a novel. Patrick Hamilton's The Slaves of Solitude. It is extraordinary bleak - reading it is like being broken over someone's knee like a tiny piece of kindling. Any novel in which the heroine's first name is not revealed until 160 pages in - and you don't even notice - is doing something right. It chronicles the relentless self-sabotage of a woman walling herself slowly into loneliness, spinsterhood, penury and, possibly death. I've never read such an utterly forceful account of the sheer insidious poison of self-doubt, and pessimism, and self-imposed victimhood.

Spiderman III: attack of the plotholes, or, what a rubbish film this was.

Isn't it interesting that when Tobey Maguire is hit by the black goo, that, contrary to most evil transformations, he actually turns into a sexually attractive figure. The film is so incoherent that it is hard to tell what precisely is criticised, but it isn't his promiscuity, because the film presents his song to Kirsten Dunst as his climactically galling act. This opposition raises the question of what Spiderman ought to be. Ought he be chaste? Not necessarily, because the film rewards his entanglement with Dunst. Instead the envenomed Maguire is criticised for having agency: we're only comfortable with a figure like Spiderman if he is entirely contained and subservient in every regard. As Spiderman, his access to and obeisance to a moral code that other characters in the story skate around, as normal people everywhere skate around the moral codes they're looking for, is a compulsion. He is a embodied social justice who, with inhuman constancy (and this is why his relationship with Dunst suffers) fulfills his duty.

There's nothing new about such embodiments, of course. But what is interesting is that when Spiderman is envenomed, he too is given choice, as Maguire was. And when he has that agency - or free will, if you like - he becomes, instantly, an anti-hero.

The lack of faith that this volte-face demonstrates in the franchise's underlying premise - that a person could single-handedly have the power to fight his people's wrong-doing - is what makes Spiderman III so unhappily miscarried a film. The authorial distrust that inverting the hero provokes would be strong enough, properly paced, for two hours' captivation at least. That's why the film is so staggeringly alienating. When authorial trust/distrust is relegated to the role of peripheral gimmick, so is the audience. At which point, it's really pretty hard to engage with the film at all.