Living Crazy

The Economist.com article on Newsvine reports that mathematicians have modeled the slower movements of people who are depressed. 

It isn’t news that movements slow down during depression, but it is interesting that the author jumps immediately to this account of why movement slows down: "a mental disorder which isolates people from human society …which must surely have its origins in some malfunction of the nerve cells." Of course we need nerve cells or we wouldn’t be people. But do nerve cells determine that sad feelings go along with slow movement? Wouldn’t another, more interesting place to look be the meaning of speediness and slowness in the post-industrial societies of today? In our cultural milieu, fast means success, energy, productivity, vitality and slow means failure, fatigue, and lack of progress. Can’t we imagine another kind of society in which different values would be attached to these opposites? In a society that valued calm, reflection, removal, and stillness highly, would depression still be experienced as isolating and miserable? When I taught at Princeton, my colleague, another anthropologist, Gananath Obeyesekere, who is from Sri Lanka, would sometimes notice that my movements were slowed and my expressions downcast. He would then mention that in Buddhist thought, ceasing to care about the things of the world, removal from worldly engagement, are marks of enlightenment. I might not have felt less depressed, but I had gained a new window to think about the experience.