Rachel’s mother taps on her door, then enters without waiting
for a response. She finds Rachel on her bed, in tears.
Rachel’s mother shakes her head. “Honey, what do you
have to cry about? Look at this room. Nice furniture, nice
clothes—if you’d bend over and pick them up off the floor—
your own phone, a TV, a VCR. People would kill for such nice
things.
“And you. Don’t you have lots of friends, and parents who
love you? But all the time you’re up here, sobbing as if your
heart would break.”
Rachel’s mother shakes her head again. “I just don’t get it.”What’s to get? Depression means being sad for no reason. Rachel’s
mother knows this, but shereallybelieves that when you’re sad, there must
be a reason. Rachel’s mother wants desperately to know what the reason
is, so long as it isn’t her.
But what if it is her? Interchanges like this, recounted in therapy,
have convinced countless practitioners that people like Rachel are sad
because they have lousy mothers. The idea has become part of our intel-
lectual wallpaper, but that doesn’t mean it’s true. Being sad for no reason
is so hard to imagine that therapists may inadvertently search for a reason
in their own beliefs about how things should be. They think, I’d be sad too
if I had a mother like that. This is not terribly different from Rachel’s
mother thinking that sadness must be the result of not having something
you want. Somehow, the notion of a disorder that causes people to be sad
for no reason disappears in a cloud of fuzzy logic.
But wait. Rachel’s doctor believes. She prescribes Zoloft, and by
ignoring Rachel’s mother’s issues and other personal problems, turns being
sad for no reason into having no reason to be sad. Unfortunately, the deal
is too good to be true.
Mental Disease or Psychological Disorder?
Physicians, by and large, see mental illnesses as physical problems to be
treated with medication. Psychologists see them as distortions of percep-
34 ❧Emotional Explosions