I came across a remarkable presentation, moving in its personal expression of the experience of depression, along with the shame and fear of being 'seen' as depressed. These reflections are simultaneously encouraging and discouraging, but in sharing them, I hope more people can be encouraged to acknowledge their own emotional difficulties, and more of us can work to create a culture that is supportive. If it is not ourselves, then someone we know, in our family, at work, one of our friends, struggles to live with depression.
Prof. Peter Railton, a Univ. of Michigan professor who specializes in the philosophy of science, was invited to give the John Dewey lecture at the American Philosophical Association national convention. The whole lecture is worth reading, covering the scope of his career, and the social context of his work over the past 40 years, but this piece of self-disclosure, in front of a very public gathering of colleagues, struck me for its candor and bravery:
Railton, P. (2015) Innocent Abroad: Rupture, Liberation, and Solidarity. John Dewey Lecture before the American Philosophical Association. St. Louis
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/...
“From my later days as a young faculty member, making the transition back from outsider to insider, working with graduate students and colleagues, I got a sense of the moral world as deeply intertwined with affect as well as deliberation and action. Indeed, I have come to believe that the world of cognition is no less steeped in affect. That’s as it should be, I now realize,since affect is the mind’s way of registering appreciation—of evidence, of the importance of a fact, of the value of an action, of the goodness of a life. Most of things I blame myself for in life I did from fear of social embarrassment and humiliation—this has been a much more effective deterrent than clubs or threats in keeping me from doing the right thing. Reasoning has certainly helped me try to address these fears, but reasoning has done an almost equally good job of rationalizing my failures to overcome them. When I have managed to overcome this fear, it is because an appreciation of the values and ideals and lives at stake got the better of my over-socialized self—I felt, and not merely thought, I had to act.
And from my quiet hours listening to my teachers as I myself was becoming a teacher, has finally come a resolve. It is fear of just such social embarrassment and humiliation that have kept me from calling depression by its right name. Here is yet another way of being an outsider, another way of being shut off from life. As academics, we live in its midst. We know how it hurts our students, our colleagues, our teachers, our families. Of course, most of us are “educated” about depression—we like to think that we no longer consider it a stain on one’s character. We’ve gotten beyond that. Or have we?" (pg. 13)
To psychologists, it might not seem surprising or revelatory that "the world of cognition is no less steeped in affect", but to a gathering of philosophers, this apparently needed to be stated explicitly. My impression (perhaps false), is that philosophy programs promote the notion that cognition can be disentangled from affect, like refining metal from ore, and affect is discarded like slag. Prof. Railton's account suggests this culture of the primacy of cognition both contributed to his hiding his depression, and led him to try to think his way out out of depression and anxiety, only to find "reasoning has done an almost equally good job of rationalizing my failures to overcome them".
I was especially moved by his open plea to his colleagues-- among the most intelligent and scholarly individuals in the world-- to acknowledge the harm caused by a culture of silence, the perpetuation of stigma, even in 2015: depression, something known to to affect each us, our families, communities, can be ignored, and this does real harm.
I think we're all indebted to Prof. Railton for his honesty and bravery; at a moment he could have easily kept on his professional 'mask', he decided to show his humanity.