Defending Antidepressants

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I probably find this more interesting than most of you, but I wanted to call attention to this article in the New York Times by Judith Warner on antidepressants. This week a study on Paxil and imipramine said the antidepressants worked no better than a placebo on people with mild or moderate depression. Lots of studies have said this. However,

Antidepressants do work for very severely depressed people, as well as for those whose mild depression is chronic. However, the researchers found, the pills don’t work for people who aren’t really depressed — people with short-term, minor depression whose problems tend to get better on their own.

There is a regular cult of people trying to get antidepressants banned because they believe them to be dangerous and fake and just a scam for the pharmaceutical industry to make money. And one of the arguments I hear is about all the studies that allegedly have shown they don’t work any better than placebos.

Warner goes on to document that, in America, people with clinical depression are more likely to be undertreated than overtreated.

This is the big picture of mental health care in America: not perfectly healthy people popping pills for no reason, but people with real illnesses lacking access to care; facing barriers like ignorance, stigma and high prices; or finding care that is ineffective.

Frodo Lives

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Or, one of the dumbest things any human being ever said … a comment on Bill O’Reilly’s blog …

As for the comment on Atheists – keep in mind – by claiming to be an Atheist – a person is acknowledging the absolute and certain existence of God! Otherwise there would be no God to Not Believe In!

Snark away, troops. Just don’t forget — the real enemy is not God. It is Teh Stupid.

(And read on to “I Am Misquoted by Bill O’Reilly“)

I Am Misquoted by Bill O’Reilly

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This is actually a Buddhism issue, but I’m posting on this blog so I can cross-post everywhere I can think of. Something I wrote on my Buddhism site has been misrepresented by Bill O’Reilly, and I want to set the record straight.

The back story: As I mentioned on The Mahablog earlier this week, on Sunday Brit Hume said some obnoxious thing on Fox News Sunday about how Tiger Woods should convert to Christianity —

“The extent to which he can recover seems to me depends on his faith,” said Hume. “He is said to be a Buddhist. I don’t think that faith offers the kind of redemption and forgiveness offered by the Christian faith. My message to Tiger is, ‘Tiger turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.”

My first reaction, from the Buddhism blog, is titled “Let’s Forgive Brit Hume“:

I don’t like to point out others’ faults, but given the record I would think Christians would show a little more humility about offering advice to the sexually wayward. As Jesus once said, let those who have never sinned throw the first stones (John 8:7).

However, Mr. Hume is right, in a sense, that Buddhism doesn’t offer redemption and forgiveness in the same way Christianity does. Buddhism has no concept of sin; therefore, redemption and forgiveness in the Christian sense are meaningless in Buddhism. Forgiveness is important, but it is approached differently in Buddhism, and I’ll get to that in a bit.

From there I went into a very general, brief, basic explanation of the way Buddhism guides people with, um, problems such as Tiger Woods’s, and I linked to articles with more detail. I don’t know Tiger Woods personally, I can’t imagine where his head is, and I don’t presume to offer spiritual counseling to people I don’t know and who haven’t asked for it.

But the point was that Buddhism has an entirely different approach to dealing with our imperfections. In brief, instead of redemption and forgiveness, you might say we do atonement and “cleansing.” The lack of “redemption” in the Christian sense is utterly irrelevant. It was by no means an “admission” that Christianity is the superior religion, or that Tiger Woods would be better off converting to it.

And you probably already see where this is going.

Initially the post had some good responses, including a nice mention on U.S.A. Today‘s Faith and Reason website.

Then the Family Research Council stepped in, quoting me but out of context to suggest I approved of what Brit Hume said. Then the FRC writer repeated the old slander that Buddhism is a religion without faith or hope, in which humans are doomed to trudge wearily through one life after another working off old, bad karma.

However, Buddhism is a path of liberation from the wheel of samsara, a little point the Family Research Council left out. The Buddha explicitly rejected the idea that people are fated to be punished in the future for the bad deeds of the past. Further, Buddhist teachings on karma and reincarnation are very different from what most people think they are, but I don’t want to go into a long lecture on that here.

Frederick Clarkson graciously gave me a spot at Talk to Action to rebut the FRC. And there I wrote,

A problem with side-by-side comparisons of the relative merits of Christianity versus Buddhism is that the two religions are understood and practiced within very different conceptual frameworks. For example, Sprigg and other conservative Christians persist in extolling redemption as an essential feature of their religion that Buddhism lacks. But to Buddhists, this is irrelevant. It might be said of Buddhism that it is a means to perceive, deeply and intimately, why we don’t need to be redeemed.

Finally we get to the Devil himself, Bill O’Reilly. Today I discovered I am quoted on his blog.

My colleague Brit Hume has aroused the ire of some secularists as well as some Buddhists by advising Tiger Woods to seek redemption through Christianity in place of his mother’s religion of Buddhism. Said Mr. Hume about Mr. Woods, “He’s said to be a Buddhist. I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So my message to Tiger would be, ‘Tiger, turn your faith—turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.'”

Almost immediately, the far left began mocking Hume as a religious fanatic. Some of the comments directed at him were as hateful as anything directed towards Tiger Woods.

So, let’s look at what happened. According to the Buddhist journalist Barbara Hoetsu O’Brien, Hume is correct about Buddhism. That faith does not offer forgiveness and redemption the way Christianity does. That’s because Buddhism has no concept of sin.

The clear implication is that I absolved Hume of disparaging Buddhism and agree with everything he said. But he did disparage Buddhism. That’s plainly obvious. And I disagreed with what he said except for a minor doctrinal technicality.

And, of course, O’Reilly didn’t bother to link back to my site.

O’Reilly goes on from there to claim Hume wasn’t really proselytizing, which is absurd on its face, and that the only reason people are carping about what Hume said is that they hate Christians. Dissing Buddhism doesn’t count. They got a Buddhist to say so!

One other thing, unrelated to O’Reilly — all my life I’ve heard the phrase “let those who have never sinned throw the first stones” as a metaphor about not accusing others of something one is guilty of oneself. I assumed anyone with basic American cultural literacy would know that, especially when it is near a link to a list of scandals involving famous evangelicals.

But the conservative blogger The Anchoress came up with this —

Ms. O’ Brien seems to be mistaking Hume’s obvious compassion for Woods as “stone-throwing.” Having watched the video several times, it seems to me that Hume is doing no such thing. Like Creative Minority, I see Hume taking Wood’s situation, and the state of his soul very seriously, and from the perspective of his own beliefs. Rather than hoisting a stone of judgment in Wood’s direction, Hume is offering what he believes to be a healing balm. The distinction between stoning someone to death or offering them hope for their lives is not exactly a fine or subtle one; the fact that Ms. O’ Brien can’t make that distinction suggests that she -like most of us- has allowed a prejudice -or her condescension- to dull her own clarity, and that -again like most of us- she finds it hard to resist the urge to cynicism.

To which I can say only — WTF? She utterly misinterpreted the metaphor. Is she from this planet?

I also got this comment to the blog, which I mostly deleted, from somebody named Mark —

So suggesting someone consider Christianity as a faith tradition is somehow synonymous with stoning someone to death? How? Please give me a logical argument as to how those two concepts, suggesting someone adopt a particular religion, and executing someone by pummeling them with stones (a brutal, slow, and painful form of death) are equivalent? That is the most bigoted statement against any particular faith tradition I think I have ever read.

When the Jehovah’s Witnesses ring my doorbell and try to hand me literature, I don’t consider it to be the equivalent of taking my life. When a Hare Krishna tries to sell me a flower at the airport, I don’t see them as executioners.

How did you come up with such a hateful comparison? How dark is your heart to think this stuff up? How bigoted is your soul to have such a closed mind?

If I have a closed mind, this guy seems to have no mind at all. How twisted does one have to be to have interpreted what I wrote that way?

I understand that early Christians developed a martyr cult that glorified death by martyrdom. It seems some Christians still get their kicks out of imagining they are being martyred.

Where it comes to proselytization, I take very seriously the third of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Precepts of Engaged Buddhism —

Do not force others, including children, by any means whatsoever, to adopt your views, whether by authority, threat, money, propaganda, or even education. However, through compassionate dialogue, help others renounce fanaticism and narrow-mindedness.

It honestly doesn’t bother me when people choose other religions, or no religion. I try to clear up misconceptions and ignorance about Buddhism, but I don’t push it on people.

That said, I’m saying Buddhism is superior to Christianity in one way — enabling people to stop bullshitting themselves about themselves. The sincere practice of Buddhism leads one to a deep self honesty, especially about one’s fears and pain. Christianity — at least in its current popular formats — all too often amounts to slapping a band-aid of dogma over your wounds and then pretending you’re not still bleeding.

Short Takes

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Holy Joe’s fall from grace, or at least from the favor of Connecticut voters.

So who’s emboldening the terrorists now?

It may be that Christianity has stronger redemption benefits than Buddhism, but as I remember the benefit doesn’t kick in until you repent. You can’t be redeemed until you admit you did something wrong, in other words, which means Brit Hume is damned.

Introducing the Manicheanism Alert icon. I figure it will save me time arguing with people. And we already have a winner!

Meyerson: We Need a Progressive Movement

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The retirement of senators Dodd and Dorgan (Dodd I’m sorry about; Dorgan I’m not) underscores the urgency of passing a health care reform bill in this Congress. It’s likely there will be fewer Democratic senators in 2011, which will make progressive legislation even more unlikely.

For all of you who still think that if the current bill is killed Congress will get right to work and pass a better, more progressive bill — yeah, and I’m Charlie the Tuna. We’ve got less than one year to get something passed and signed into law. And if it took all of 2009 for Congress to come up with the bills they finally passed, how zippy do you think the legislators will be in a midterm election year?

That said, Harold Meyerson may piss off some progressives with his column today. We need a progressive movement, Meyerson says, for there to be a renewal of progressivism.

The reasons for the stillbirth of the new progressive era are many and much discussed. There’s the death of liberal and moderate Republicanism, the reluctance of some administration officials and congressional Democrats to challenge the banks, the ever-larger role of money in politics (see reluctance to challenge banks, above), the weakness of labor, the dysfunctionality of the Senate — the list is long and familiar. But if there’s a common feature to the political landscapes in which Carter, Clinton and now Obama were compelled to work, it’s the absence of a vibrant left movement.

What does Meyerson mean by a “vibrant left movement”?

The America over which FDR presided was home to mass organizations of the unemployed; farmers’ groups that blocked foreclosures, sometimes at gunpoint; general strikes that shut down entire cities, and militant new unions that seized factories. Both communists and democratic socialists were enough of a presence in America to help shape these movements, generating so much street heat in so many congressional districts that Democrats were compelled to look leftward as they crafted their response to the Depression. During Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, the civil rights movement, among whose leaders were such avowed democratic socialists as Martin Luther King Jr. and James Farmer, provided a new generation of street heat that both compelled and abetted the president and Congress to enact fundamental reforms.

Some on the Left don’t seem to have noticed that it’s still relatively safe to ignore us. Not quite as safe as it used to be, but we’re still not nearly as frightening as the Right. We have very little real leverage in Washington, which is why we couldn’t overcome the power of the lobbyists and the Right in crafting health care reform. If we (as some suggest) walk away from the political process, few will miss us.

What we’ve got is the leftie blogosphere, and lots of spokespersons saying lots of stuff, but there’s no real movement and no real leadership. Certainly, we can fault President Obama in the leadership department:

In America, major liberal reforms require not just liberal governments, but autonomous, vibrant mass movements, usually led by activists who stand at or beyond liberalism’s left fringe. No such movements were around during Carter and Clinton’s presidencies. For his part, Obama won election with something new under the political sun: a list of 13 million people who had supported his campaign. But he has consistently declined to activate his activists to help him win legislative battles by pressuring, for instance, those Democratic members of Congress who have weakened or blocked his major bills. To be sure, loosing the activists would have brought problems of its own: Unlike Roosevelt or Johnson, who benefited from autonomous movements, Obama would be answerable for every loopy tactic his followers employed. But in the absence of both a free-standing movement and a legion of loyalists, Congress isn’t feeling much pressure from the left to move Obama’s agenda.

Actually, I think Obama has made some attempts at activating people. I remember, for example, the request of last summer to take petitions to congresspersons’ offices asking them to pass health care reform. That doesn’t seem to have gone very far, however. I think it’s been such a long time since there was anything resembling a progressive movement and anything resembling a progressive president at the same time that we don’t know what to do with each other.

I’ve probably harped on this before, but the liberal movment that existed in the 1960s really did fall apart in the 1970s, and this was liberals’ own fault. All of the various liberation-for-me movements went their own ways and took no interest in building coalitions. Further — and this was partly inspired by our old buddy Ralph Nader — it came to be conventional wisdom among leftie activists that working outside the political parties and challenging laws we didn’t like through the court system was the way to go.

And when the Democrats lost the foundation of the New Deal coalition that had supported progressive legislation from FDR to LBJ, the Democratic Party became more conservative and more beholden to big special interest campaign donors. Thanks loads, Ralph.

It has been only recently, and through the netroots, that progressives across the nation came to be in touch with each other and began to organize to support Democratic politicians who seemed inclined to be progressive. But we still have very little real power, and that’s something we need to be honest with ourselves about, and take some responsibility for.

The construction of social movements is always a bit of a mystery. The right has had great success over the past year in building a movement that isn’t really for anything but that has channeled anew the fears and loathings of millions of Americans. If Glenn Beck can help do that for the right, can’t, say, Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann help build a movement against the banks or for jobs programs? It might well be too little too late, but without left pressure from below, the Obama presidency will end up looking more like Carter’s or Clinton’s than Roosevelt’s or Johnson’s.

Part of the problem may be that too many leftie activists don’t know how to work for something instead of against it. There is a huge difference between pressuring the Obama Administration to be more progressive and declaring he is the enemy and must be defeated. He may not be the natural ally many had hoped for, but working with the Right to destroy his administration is not going to usher in a new era of progressivism, either.

What do you think of Meyerson’s column? What would an autonomous, vibrant mass movement, led by activists who stand at or beyond liberalism’s left fringe look like today?

Update: Steve Benen and Prairie Weather add some valuable comments to the Meyerson column.

Short Takes

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Stuff to read —

Paul Starr, “Governing in the Age of Fox News”

David Greenberg, “The Honeymooners”

Paul Waldman writes about the chattering class’s fixation on “bipartisanship” over “results.”

Health care spending is growing faster than the economy.

Coming to textbooks at a school near you: creationism, global climate change denial, the denigration of the civil rights movement, and the rehabilitation of Joe McCarthy. Enjoy.

I want to make a brief comment on Hendrik Hertzberg’s “Um, Pathetic,” in which Hertzberg describes opposition to the health care reform bills in Congress coming from the Left as based in fallacy — read the article to appreciate which fallacy.

Hertzberg is saying much the same stuff I said in “Scorched Earth Politics.” Some on the Left are taking Hertzberg’s criticism as a call to STFU, but I don’t believe that’s true. It’s closer to “grow up,” or maybe “chill.” There is a huge middle ground between criticizing actions and policies — robust and snarky criticism, even — and resorting to over-the-top character assassination, and that’s a middle ground some on the Left need to find.