THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION THURSDAY, AUGUST 1, 2019 | 9

Vladimir Putin’s Russia has openly

embarked on an aggressive re-

armament. The Intermediate-Range

Nuclear Forces Treaty is dead (broken

by Russia, then canceled by President

Trump), the Strategic Arms Reduction

Treaty is near death, and scarcely a

month goes by without the Russian

Ministry of Defense or President Putin

himself boasting of a new game-chang-

ing miracle weapon — what Germans

once called a wunderwaffe.

Well, do we have a new Cold War? Is

there any similarity between Mr. Putin

and the leaders of the Soviet Union?

In fact, there’s no similarity. The

Soviet Union rarely bragged about its

weapons, although it often paraded

rockets past the Kremlin. It claimed to

be a peaceful state, surrounded by

capitalist warmongers, and when it

came to new weaponry, it was ex-

tremely secretive. Back then, every-

thing Mr. Putin is bragging about

today would have been top-secret,

burn-before-reading stuff.

So let’s have a closer look. Start with

the S-400 Triumf antiaircraft system,

which Turkey recently acquired with

great hype. Russia deployed it back in

2007 and said it was the best air-de-

fense system ever made, with a 250-

mile range 40N6E missile capable of

engaging targets at altitudes ranging

from 15 feet to 20 miles — a capability

unparalleled by any other surface-to-

air missile system anywhere.

But its capability hasn’t had a

chance to prove itself in action. The

first successful test of the 40N6E mis-

sile took place in 2015, seven years

after deployment; the tests were not

finished until July 2018, and last Feb-

ruary the first shipment of 40H6Es

was shipped off to China, which had

been awaiting them eagerly for four

years.

Guess what? The ship was caught in

a storm, and even though those pre-

cious missiles were supposedly sealed

up tight, Russian officials said they got

wet and had to be destroyed. So we

can be sure that what made the S-

missile system unparalleled was that it

took 11 years to become officially de-

ployed. And we still can’t be sure that

it’s fully functional. Only God knows

what Turkey is about to get.

Let’s take a look at another Russian

wunderwaffe: the hypersonic cruise

missile Avangard. It was one of six

new Russian strategic weapons un-

veiled by President Putin in his state

address on March 1, 2018. The Ministry

MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV\TASS, VIA GETTY IMAGES

The super-

destructive

weapons

touted by

Russia’s

president

aren’t as

original, or

functional,

as he claims.

Yulia Latynina

Putin’s fancy weapons? Everything old is new again

LATYNINA,PAGE

President Vladi-

mir Putin, center,

watching the

launch of Russia’s

Avangard hyper-

sonic missile

system via a video

link to the coun-

try’s National

Defense Manage-

ment Center, last

year.

The antidepressant Prozac came on

the market in 1986; coincidentally, it

was the year I was born. By the time I

saw my first psychiatrist, as an

early-2000s teenager, another half-

dozen antidepressants belonging to the

same class of drugs, selective seroton-

in reuptake inhibitors, or S.S.R.I.s, had

joined it on the market — and in the

public consciousness.

The despondent cartoon blob from a

memorable series of TV ads for the

S.S.R.I. drug Zoloft became a near-

instant piece of pop culture iconogra-

phy after its May 2001 debut. It was

commonplace through much of my

childhood to find ads for other S.S.R.I.s

tucked into the pages of the women’s

magazines I’d leaf through at the salon

where my mother had her hair cut,

outlining criteria for determining

whether Paxil “may be right for you.”

In my depressed, anxious, eating

disordered adolescence, I knew by

name the pills that promised to help

me.

The mainstreaming of S.S.R.I.s and

other psychopharmaceuticals didn’t

eradicate stigmas against mental

illness, but it certainly normalized a

sense of their prevalence. (A 2003

study concluded that child and adoles-

cent psychotropic prescription rates

alone had nearly tripled since the late

1980s.) It also shaped the tone of con-

versation.

No longer were mental illnesses

necessarily discussed as a shameful

aberration, but rather as chemically

preordained sicknesses: functions of

what became known as a “chemical

imbalance.”

As a teenager entering the psychiat-

ric care system, I found this logic

tremendously reassuring. I came from

an extended family of medical

providers and had been raised to trust

in the hard, scientific grounding of

modern medicine.

Internalizing my diagnoses as in-

scriptions of emotional destiny also

alleviated my sense of personal blame

for the inability to will away my black

dogs. When the drugs failed to deliver

the cure I’d been promised, I didn’t

dare reveal my shameful secret: that

maybe the issue wasn’t just with

chemicals in my brain, but a bad and

broken me.

Nearly two decades later, I quake

with anger at the wholesale failure of

mental health care in America — a

rigid and restrictive system that

leaves even the reasonably privileged,

like me, with little to work with, and so

many others with nothing.

The primacy of the chemical imbal-

ance theory of mental and neurological

disorders may be at the root of the

problem. It is an oversimplification at

best. A new book by the Harvard Medi-

cal historian Anne Harrington, “Mind

Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search

for the Biology of Mental Illness,”

argues that the “tunnel vision” of

modern psychiatry, with its fixation on

wiring and fixed diagnoses, cannot

adequately address what has yet to be

understood about the human psyche.

Psychiatrists are full doctors with

the ability to issue diagnoses and

prescribe medication. But these days,

many of them spend much less time

than they did in the past practicing

psychotherapy, or what we might call

“talk therapy.” Instead, they tend to

meet with patients briefly and write

prescriptions. As a result, “psychiatry”

has more or less become shorthand for

an industry of medication manage-

ment.

When, in my early 20s, I asked a

new psychiatrist — one of the only

mental health providers I could find

who would accept my insurance and

had openings for new patients — if we

could try discussing some of the prob-

lems I’d been having, she looked at me

as though I’d proposed a joint mission

to Mars. “Ohhhhh,” she said, nodding,

as my meaning dawned on her. “You

want to see a counselor.”

What I wanted, and still want, were

options.

The jury is out on the extent to

which mental illness is hard-wired, but

black-and-white narratives of psycho-

pathology neglect the tremendous

psychological impacts of social and

material circumstance: access to the

basics of survival; the burdens of

intergenerational trauma and insuffi-

cient social support systems; the

existential gut punch of pervasive

injustice.

A more realistic, nuanced approach

to the way we conceive of mental

illness would go a long way toward

validating the myriad potential causes

for human suffering and clearing paths

for many more in need.

To be sure, many people need medi-

cation, and greatly benefit from it. The

right drugs have made my life better

too.But I fantasize about a future in

which mental illness is understood less

in terms of static diagnoses and psy-

chopharmaceutical stopgaps than each

individual’s symptoms and the circum-

stances that might inform them.

I don’t mean to say that the current

system doesn’t offer some hope — at

least for those with the means to pur-

sue it. Now in my early 30s, I remain

firmly entangled in the American

mental health care apparatus, albeit on

my own terms. I see a therapist (which

I’m now in the fortunate position to be

able to pay for, out of pocket) who

helps me contextualize and work

through problems. I manage medica-

tions with a psychiatrist, and purchase

pills with some coverage from insur-

ance.

I also make it a daily priority to get

at least some light exercise, whether a

walk or a jog or a bicycle commute. I

maintain a regular yoga practice, try

to eat a balanced diet and get enough

sleep, read constantly, and work to

nurture social connections and build

community. All of these, I’ve learned, I

can do to maintain my emotional and

psychological well-being, and the key

word here is “maintain.” It’s about

process, not prognosis.

Rather than view my psychological

experience as a biologically fated

roller coaster, I’ve come to think of my

mental health as a reflection of the

complex ebbs and flows of life; accord-

ingly, I’ve developed tools to better

mitigate that which I can’t control, an

agency I once wouldn’t have imagined

possible. I feel, for the first time, like a

person who belongs to the world.

Thinking of

my mental

illness as

preordained

missed many

of the causes

of — and

solutions to

—my

emotional

suffering.

It’s not just a chemical imbalance

LEIGH WELLS

KELLI MARÍA KORDUCKIis a writer.

Kelli María Korducki

Opinion

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News"

versation.

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No longer were mental illnesses

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No longer were mental illnesses

necessarily discussed as a shameful

VK.COM/WSNWS

necessarily discussed as a shameful

aberration, but rather as chemically

VK.COM/WSNWS

aberration, but rather as chemically

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