What if ‘fixing’ a mental condition changes the person you are?

By David McElroy · September 20, 2011

For years, doctors have been looking for one gene to blame for problems such as depression and schizophrenia. A couple of new studies have dashed those hopes, because it seems that dozens or even hundreds of genes are involved. The doctors involved in the study were disappointed. I was relieved.

If you could take a pill — or get a shot or have an operation — to “fix” some way in which you’re different from other people, would you do it? With some things, the answer is clearly, “Yes.” If you were blind or deaf or had damaged vocal chords, most people would gladly make the change.

With other things, the answer is pretty clearly, “No.” If you’re left-handed, you don’t want to be made right-handed. If your eyes are blue or green, you don’t want to change your eyes to brown just because it’s the most common thing in the world. For other things, the answer is more gray? Do you remove a mole that you’ve been worried about all your life? Do you straighten your nose? For most of us, we conclude that we’d rather be what we were born with in most areas, simply because it’s who we are.

If the questions and answers are that complicated for your physical body, how much more complicated are they for the mind? We can sometimes see our bodies as physical shells we ride around in on Earth, but our thoughts and feelings are what make us entirely different from the other people around us, at least as far as our own internal thoughts are concerned. (I’m ignoring the issue of a soul, because this is about psychology and ethics, not about theology.)

If the doctors in one of the studies in the news Monday had come up with one gene to blame for depression or schizophrenia, would you want whatever “cure” they came up with? As long as my life were fairly functional, I know I wouldn’t want it. Whatever goes on inside my brain — and my heart and something on the inside — is what makes me “me,” and I don’t want someone else monkeying around what what I am.

There’s always been a fairly obvious strong correlation between madness and creative genius. In many cases, the most creative artists were also the maddest. (Scientists think they might now understand at least part of the reason for the connection, but I’m not really going to get into that.) The art above is a self-portrait of Vincent van Gogh, who is thought to have suffered from bi-polar disorder or some other issue. I’m going to use a couple of his other works throughout this article. And this is often the case for artists, even though there’s obviously not always that direct a connection. Not all people with mental illnesses are especially creative as far as we can tell, and not every creative genius is “crazy.”

But what if both creativity and mental issues such as depression exist on a continuum? Few people would choose to be truly insane, even if amazing creative genius of some kind came with it. But what if all of our creative types — and I like to think of myself as among them — have just a bit of one of those mental “defects” caused by those dozens or hundreds of genes?

What if our ability to create and to come up with startlingly original ideas comes directly in proportion to our propensity to be bothered by depression or mood swings or worse? Is that something to be “fixed”? Or is it something that makes certain people who they are?

My mother suffered from bi-polar disorder — which we called manic depression back then — so I’ve seen first-hand how it can affect people. I also know that my sisters and I have all inherited various bits and pieces of her tendency to be a bit odd. OK. A lot odd sometimes. (I wrote about my family and some of the ways that being “crazy” had affected me a couple of months ago.)

Here’s the thing. My parents should never have married. She had issues that he was never going to understand. (My family was broken starting when I was about 5, but the back-and-forth madness between them continued for years.) They loved each other, but each had no real understanding of the other. He was about as “normal” — in the genetic sense — as it’s possible to get. She was eccentric and weird and disorganized and a hundred other things he hated. He tried to force her to be like him. It almost killed her. Living the “normal” lie that he forced her to live sent her into a deep depression from which she never recovered. It destroyed their family and hurt their children more than I can tell you.

But the problem wasn’t her craziness. From the vantage point of years later, I see that she could have lived a happy and joyful life if she hadn’t been living with a man who didn’t understand her and who slowly tried harder and harder to change her. (The first few years of their marriage were actually quite happy, they say, until they had children, at which point everything changed.)

So my mother was bi-polar and seemed to suffer from some other issues (possibly a mild case of borderline personality disorder), but she was basically a happy, creative and joyful person away from him. She passed along that creativity and weirdness to her children, who are happy when they’re creating and being weird. I pay a price for it at times in a tendency toward mild depression. I’ve never had the kind that’s been debilitating, but I can’t deny that there’s a piece of it there. I feel things too deeply — both good things and bad things — not to have times of going into a hole.

But here’s why I mention this. I like who I am. I don’t want to be like everyone else. I want to feel things more deeply than others. I want to have crazy ideas and see connections that others don’t make. This is who I am. I don’t need — or want — a “cure” to make me more like everybody else.

I’m certainly glad that I was born, but I’m sorry for my mother’s sake that she didn’t marry someone who could understand her and live an enjoyable life of mutual craziness. There are millions of other people such as my mother — people who are a little warped and who don’t quite fit. They can be perfectly happy as they are with the right people.

There are many people such as me, those of us who don’t quite fit into the normal world and who can be polarizing and weird and even creative at times. I don’t think most of us want a “cure” for who we are. We are willing to accept the downsides to this along with the upsides — and be content with having to find the rare people who are capable of understanding us.

I understand there is a group of people who are not functional in the world, who have mental problems that go beyond the kind of “functional crazy” that I’m talking about here. For them, finding those genes that make people crazy (and making a change) might be a good thing, on balance. For me, though, taking away the bit of “crazy” that I have would be as bad as a lobotomy. It would take away who and what I am.

It would be nice to fit more into the rest of the world. It would be nice to be understood by more people. It would be nice not to deal with a bit of depression from time to time. But it would be a nightmare to have taken away from me what I am. It would be a terrible tradeoff, because … well … I mostly like being a bit crazy. And I like other “crazy” people. I “get” them — and they “get” me. Few others do. I don’t want a “cure” to change that.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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