David Brooks, Mental Health Counselor

It’s interesting to see how quickly therapy slides into religion. Reading David Brooks, who in his most recent column was pretending to have deep feelings for an anonymous individual, one sees him sermonizing about the value of suffering. And even with the notion that we ought to share suffering, not to help people to overcome it.

Of course, as is normal, Brooks is going to embarrass himself by showing his deep sensitive to the suffering of an audience member who attended one of his lectures, but what else can he do when pondering what seems to be a serious depression.

Given that empathy is all the rage, and especially the rage among those who do not know how to think, it is not surprising to find Brooks responding by saying something like: I feel your pain. 

Examine his column opening:

Several weeks ago, I gave a talk, and afterward the questions from the audience came to me on index cards. Most of the questions were about politics or society, but one card read: “What do you do when you’ve spent your life wanting to be dead?”

I didn’t answer that card because I didn’t know anything about the person who wrote it, and because I didn’t know what to say. But it has haunted me and I’ve kept the card on my night stand ever since.

He still does not know anything about the person who wrote the question. He does not know whether it was a man or a woman, a young person or a senior citizen. He does not know about this person’s family, friends, career or the rest. 

He does not know whether the person is suffering from a physiological or psychological pain. He does not even know whether the writer was sincere. For all we know the person was trolling the self-important columnist.

Since we know nothing more than an anonymous sentence on an index card, we do better not to engage with the sufferer’s pain. But, Brooks is not bright enough to figure that out, so he jumps right in:

I wish I’d said that I don’t have any answers for you, but I do have a response. My response would start with the only things I know about you: You’ve been through a lot of pain over the course of your life. You have amazing powers of endurance because you are still here. I know you’re fighting still because you reached out to me. My response begins with deep respect for you.

One needs to point out, because it never seems to have crossed Brooks’s mind, but the right response would have been to recommend a psychiatric consultation. Being a Times columnist does not endow you with superior knowledge about mental health.

And one must add that the best treatments for depression are based on the cognitive therapy invented by the recently deceased Aaron Beck. What would Beck have to say? He would prescribe homework exercises designed to challenge the person’s bad habit of all-or-nothing thinking. As you might know, such extremist and absolutist thinking is an indicator of depression. Cognitive therapists will ask their patients to write down facts that would prove the validity of the statement and an equal number of facts that would disprove it. The result, a more balanced judgment, less extremist thinking.

Generally speaking, beyond medication, this is the best way to treat depression therapeutically. 

In effect, Brooks has an inkling of this. He says that the person who has undergone so much of what he calls suffering must have amazing powers of endurance. Good point. So good that he drops it in his next paragraph. 

He offers consolation. He says that the person is not alone in his suffering. It might feel that you are the only one who is suffering. But, take heart from the fact that other people are in pain, too.

The other thing I know is that you are not alone. There is always a lot of suffering in the world, and over the past few years we have seen high tides of despair. The sources of people’s pain may be different — grief, shame, exclusion, heartbreak, physical or mental health issues — but they almost always involve some feeling of isolation, of being cut off from others.

True enough, one of the most important causes of psychological pain is isolation. We have discussed the matter on many occasions on this blog. It is especially apt for a time when the government is imposing isolation on the citizenry.

And yet, thinking that other people are in the same condition is counterproductive. It discourages by suggesting that other people who feel the same pain are having the same difficulty as you are.

So, Brooks is quite correct to see that other people suffer, but, one would imagine that the goal of treatment, the goal of helping people to get along with other people, as I would put it, supersedes the banal observation that you are not the only one who is in pain. Brooks even shares something of his own pain, what he calls the seasons of his suffering-- a lame metaphor if ever there was one:

In my own seasons of suffering, I’ve been shocked at how emotional pain feels like searing physical pain in the stomach and chest, by how tempting it is to self-isolate and rob yourself of the very human contact you need most. But when it comes to extreme suffering, I must look to people who know more about it than I do, and one of those people is Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi death camps.

Frankl argued that we often can’t control what happens to us in life, that we can control only how we respond to it. If we respond to terrible circumstances with tenacity, courage, unselfishness and dignity, then we can add a deeper meaning to life. One can win small daily victories over hard circumstances.

Perhaps some people will find consolation in being compared with a death camp survivor, but the analogy fails. Someone who is being imprisoned in a Nazi death camp has every reason to stay alive, because it constitutes an act of pure defiance against people who want you to die. 

We do not know whether the person who wrote to Brooks is surrounded by people who want him or her to die. We do not know whether this person is being deprived of food, of water, of exercise... in an effort to make them die quicker.

As for overcoming isolation, the way to do it has nothing to do with sharing your pain with others. The way to do it is to get out and to get around, to have a coffee at a local Starbucks, to join a bowling league, to do some volunteer work for a charity.

These are too banal for the mini-mind of David Brooks. But the literature on therapy offers numerous examples.

As Aaron Beck discovered early in his career when he was treating a woman who was hospitalized for depression, he countered her assertion that she was feeling so badly that she could not get out of bed-- not by sharing her pain, but by showing her a way to break down the process of leaving her bed into small steps, each of which she was capable of performing. Thus, if she said that she could not get out of bed, Beck would ask her if she could put a foot on the floor. When she succeeded in accomplishing the task, he asked her whether she could put her other foot on the floor… and so on.

Evidently, this differs significantly from the Brooks approach. Dare I say, if Brooks does not know what he is talking about when it comes to treating depression, he should shut up. It is better than embarrassing himself and offering bad advice.

But then, Brooks believes that the meaning of human life is suffering. A large leap, which he bases on Biblical texts, and which is surely a distortion. There is more to human life than suffering. You are more than your pathos. Having other people feel your pain makes you an object of pity, which must be countertherapeutic.

The Bible is filled with characters who are at times overwhelmed with life and wish they could be rid of it — Jonah, Elijah, Job and even Moses. They are so central to the biblical story because desolation is part of the human experience, part of the bricks and mortar out of which we construct our lives.

And then, Brooks starts sermonizing on the value of suffering. He even suggests that some people have profited from suffering, as though that is a consolation for people who want to die. 

Suffering had such profound and unpredictable effects on those characters, as it does on all of us. Suffering can make people self-centered, loveless, humorless and angry. But we all know cases where suffering didn’t break people but broke them open — made them more caring toward and knowledgeable about the suffering of others. And the old saying that we suffer our way to wisdom is not wrong. We often learn more from the hard times than the happy ones.

In truth, we learn more from reading and conversing and even working than we do by feeling pain. Here, of course, Brooks is trying to put a positive spin on suffering, and is suggesting that all pain, whether from a broken arm, a cancerous tumor or a sense of anomie-- is the same. It is not. 

He is saying that misery loves company. For the most part it does not.

This doesn’t mean that those who have suffered should go out giving sermons and lectures. We all know the weakness of words in these circumstances. But having tasted desolation, those who have suffered do powerfully sit with others in their desolation.

Brooks next invokes clerical authority to sustain his absurd point that people in pain want others to share the pain. And yet, might this not also persuade sufferers that they are a pain for others, that they are a burden, that whatever they have is contagious:

Rabbi Elliot Kukla once described a woman with a brain injury who would sometimes fall to the floor. People around her would rush to immediately get her back on her feet, before she was quite ready. She told Kukla, “I think people rush to help me up because they are so uncomfortable with seeing an adult lying on the floor. But what I really need is for someone to get down on the ground with me.”

Kukla pointed out that getting on the floor can be anxiety-producing and, when someone is in deep despair, even dangerous to the strongest caregiver. But sometimes you just get on the floor.

No, you do not just get on the floor. Aside from the reason noted above, the person who has fallen might well feel that you are mocking him by pretending to share his experience.

But then, Brooks closes on precisely the wrong note:

I asked a pastor what he says to people in pain. One thing he says is, “I want more for you.” I repeat that sentence to you not with any illusion that the world does what I want, but simply as an expression of good will, an acknowledgment of how we all sit with our common fragility, and a recognition that life is unpredictable. It changes. In many pilgrims’ progress, the slough of despond gives way to enchanted ground.

I do not want to appear to disrespect pastoral authority, but surely, promising people a fast passage to “enchanted ground” is precisely the wrong thing to say. In a sermon offered by a pastor, enchanted ground must appear to be like Paradise, like the Heavenly City, even like the Elysian Fields. Do we really want to be suggesting that the cure for all the pain is a one-way ticket to Heaven. Do we want to say that living in constant pain is good because it will be redeemed.

In truth, this feels like an exaggeration of the message offered by religion. After all, most religions seriously frown on suicide, yet, if we offer "enchanted ground" to someone who is being crippled by pain, the chances for misinterpretation proliferate. We should never take the risk.