9781408878729

The social sciences are where you apply the scientific method not to what’s happening in

a test tube or a particle collider, but to how you and I live every day—to social life.

In that moment, I finally understood for the first time why—throughout this

journey—I kept thinking about that day when I got terribly sick in rural

Vietnam. When I yelled for drugs to stop my worst symptom—the extreme

room-spinning nausea—the doctor told me: “You need your nausea. It is a

message, and we must listen to the message. It will tell us what is wrong

with you.” If I had ignored or silenced that symptom, my kidneys would

have failed, and I would have died.

You need your nausea. You need your pain. It is a message, and we must

listen to the message. All these depressed and anxious people, all over the

world—they are giving us a message. They are telling us something has

gone wrong with the way we live. We need to stop trying to muffle or

silence or pathologize that pain. Instead, we need to listen to it, and honor

it. It is only when we listen to our pain that we can follow it back to its

source—and only there, when we can see its true causes, can we begin to

overcome it.

grieve because we have loved.

We grieve because the person we have lost mattered to us. To say that grief

should disappear on a neat timetable is an insult to the love we have felt.

Deep grief and depression, she explained to me, have identical

symptoms for a reason. Depression, I realized, is itself a form of grief—for

all the connections we need, but don’t have.

And now I realized—just like it is an insult to Joanne to say that her

ongoing grief for her daughter is a form of mental dysfunction, it was an

insult to my teenage self to say that his pain was just the result of bad brain

chemistry. It was an insult to what he had been through, and to what he

needed.