Treatment: The Depression Policy
Posted by JohnD
Photo Credit – JesterArts – Stockxpert
One of my wake-up moments arrived decades ago when I read a New York Review of Books essay on a government practice known as “channeling.” This was during the Vietnam draft era, and the term referred to the decisions that young men were forced to make about their lives because of the prospect of compulsory military service. There was plenty of stress to go around as I and every guy I knew tried to figure this one out. You could defer service if you went to college, then on to grad school (until they took that option away) or divinity school (a number of surprising conversions there) or became a conscientious objector or even leave the country. And there were many who wanted to serve, to let the draft take them or get a jump on the system and enlist – and they had the prospect of hot combat before them. The draft was always there to keep the pressure on.
The point of the article was that the draft had been designed to do more than just fill up slots in the army. Its unrelenting pressure and your personal stress were instruments of national policy to “channel” the better-off kids into college and graduate education or into training as military officers, while the working-class kids, with fewer options, would become the rank and file of the armed forces. That way, everybody would conform to the prevailing ideas of how society ought to work. That knowledge radicalized me on the spot. Government was getting its hands inside my mind and my deepest feelings! The hell with that, I thought, we’ve got to change this rotten system!
As it turned out, I was at that same time having my first adventures with psychotherapy. What I didn’t know until recently, however, was that psychiatrists of that period had their own policy about the treatment of depression that was to have even more long-lasting effects on my inner life than the temporary problem of dealing with military service.
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