WORLD OF LEARNING: EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE, DEPRESSION AND DRUGS

"The Depressing News About Antidepressants" Sharon Begley/Newsweek 1/29/10
"Head Case: Can psychiatry be a science?" Louis Menand/The New Yorker 3/1/10

I did not link to these articles on my web site, because I know the connection to learning and the brain might be considered tenuous, and I don't want to be perceived as an anti-drug. I'm all for looking at what works without preconceptions. I think. That indecisive note is there because I worry about the power of drug companies, and have no doubt that the pharmaceutical industry is at least as concerned with profit as it is with health.

The Learning and the Brain Conference I attended a few weeks ago was titled "Using Brain Research to Raise IQ and Achievement," and I thought one of the themes underlying that topic was that on the way to performance from ability and knowledge (or inherited and acquired characteristics--nature and nurture), many factors can interfere.

Sam Goldstein discussed attention and self-regulation. Linda Lantieri made a connection between problems with self-regulation and emotional intelligence. And Stephen Hinshaw focused on alexithymia, an inability to express inner emotions, and girls with that condition at risk due to anxiety and depression.

Now I'll take a somewhat shaky leap from that to the Begley and Menand articles, because more and more kids as well as adults are medicated with antidepressants. I believe we should be thinking about education and the issues raised in these pieces. We have to evaluate psychopharmacology in the social context of businesses and profit motives, in addition to effectiveness.

We can argue with Irving Kirsch's (The Emperor's New Drugs) findings that antidepressants are no better, and perhaps worse, than placebos, but we should be aware of those findings. And we should really examine what we mean by emotional intelligence, and mental health. Surely optimal brain performance is improved by optimal mental health.

"Mental disorders," Menand writes, "sit at the intersection of three distinct fields." These are biology, psychology and morality. We cannot ignore, and should not censor, the possibilities for better mental health that biological research offers. But we can't forget that it can't offer all the answers. There are good reasons to take pills, but there are good reasons not to, and better reasons to look at a range of possibilities. The questions we have about our emotional states of mind are too complex and profound to be reduced only to chemical cause and effect.

"Questions like these," Menand tells us, "are the reason we have literature and philosophy. No science will ever answer them."