Dr. Peter C Whybrow

WHAT WERE THE CIRCUMSTANCES THAT LED TO THE WRITING OF AMERICAN MANIA?

American Mania really grew out of discussions — frequently very animated discussions, I might add — with friends and colleagues during the bubble years of the late 1990s. As a writer-physician trained in neurobiology, endocrinology and neuropsychiatry I am interested in enhancing the general public’s knowledge of human behavior and what drives its aberrant forms. So American Mania is really just the latest of a series of books about how we can live more intelligently in these modern times.

The behavioral scientist in me is curious about how our ability to cope in the world — to adapt to changing circumstance — is shaped by our genetic inheritance (as evolved creatures of this planet) and by the shifting social and cultural environments that we have invented for ourselves. And as a physician I’m concerned about how our rapidly advancing knowledge of brain science can help guide human behavior in constructive ways, both individually and collectively. I guess I’m just a firm believer in the old idea that self-knowledge and good health practice is the key to a long and happy life.

ARE YOUR BOOKS WRITTEN FOR A GENERAL READERSHIP?

Yes, well that has been my intention in the last three books. In the first, The Hibernation Response, written with Robert Barr, I explored how those among us who live in cold, dark climates (as I did and do in New Hampshire) may cope successfully with winter by understanding how human behavior is shaped by the earth’s seasonal cycle, and how sensible planning and the wise use of technology can assist in that adaptation.

Subsequently in A Mood Apart; A Thinkers Guide to Emotion and its Disorder, I took up the subject of human emotion and the widely misunderstood illnesses of depression and mania. Emotions, after all, are the pith of being human — “the captains of our lives” as Vincent Van Gogh described them — and yet emotion and mood are poorly understood by many, especially when emotions go wrong and lead to illness. Thus A Mood Apart begins with the ubiquitous experience of grief (illustrated by my own grief at my father’s death, to be precise) and explains how our emotional temperament and early attachment to parents and family shape who we become as an individual. To make sense of the disabling afflictions of emotion — most commonly known as mood disorders — we must understand the role of emotion in everyday life.

AND WHAT ROLE DOES EMOTION PLAY EXACTLY?

Well, it’s most important to understand that the basic emotions of fear, pleasure, disgust etc are innate and wired deep into the human brain as the inherited social behaviors that aid survival. We share such skills with our mammalian cousins. Thus the expression of emotion is the preverbal foundation for human communication, shaping and sustaining our complex social organization. It is when the brain mechanisms of emotion are made vulnerable by inheritance and/or by challenging experience that illness results — admixed sometimes, I would add, with extraordinary achievement. In A Mood Apart I draw upon the personal stories of those who have suffered and successfully managed these illnesses (a device I have found valuable to help carry the narrative and to inform the reader about the complicated science that I sometimes describe) and thus the book provides a guide to the general reader in how to identify mood disorder in oneself, or others, and what to do when it emerges.

AND AMERICAN MANIA? IS THAT ALSO A BOOK ABOUT MOOD?

No, it is not, although American Mania does build on the same knowledge base and uses a narrative style similar to that which was so successful in A Mood Apart. As I have said the book grew out of my fascination with the dot-com frenzy that overtook America during the late 1990s. While the term mania is used in American Mania largely as a metaphor, my work with those who suffer mania did originally help seed the idea for the book. The national mood during the 1990s had much in common with the illness of manic depression, where an escalating euphoria promotes blind self-interest and an aggrandizement that feeds on itself until it “bursts” in confusion and disorder. Living through that period, and discussing it with friends both in the US and in Europe, I found myself wondering why the “irrational exuberance” of stock-market mania was so much more pronounced in America than in other industrialized nations. Was there a connection, I wondered, between this behavior and America’s unique history as a self selected migrant culture?

I have always had an interest in history, and especially the intellectual and economic roots of America’s break with England. America is the great experiment in laissez faire capitalism, one that grew out of eighteenth century Enlightenment thinking and Adam Smith’s reward-driven, instinctual-based philosophy of self-interest and capital markets. Also Americans, in general, are fascinated by risk and by pushing the envelope — be it in business, in science, in technology etc. Thus, as I thought about the reasons for America’s manic bubble from the neurobehavioral standpoint, it all began to fit together.

WOULD YOU ELABORATE?

Certainly. Basically the fit is that self-interest and risk taking lie at the core of the migrant experience — as a necessary survival mechanism — and are central to American culture and to the business world. In fact the thinking that underlies Darwin’s theory of evolution and the ideas behind a market-driven society have much in common. There’s actually considerable evidence that Darwin leaned heavily on Adam Smith’s writings (Smith, of course, is the patron saint of American capitalism) when he was working on the Origin of Species. Americans are the world’s largest contemporary collection of migrants, and as I mentioned we are particularly excited by competition and risk, of any sort. We hate to let opportunity pass us by and in that aggressive pursuit we now dominate the world. But the technologies that helped create the 1990s bubble have also created a new world of “affluence” an overload of everything from food to information that is now perpetuated by what we have come to accept as the “necessity” for commercial growth. There is growing evidence that this new demand driven environment is making us sick, in mind and body. For the reward driven creatures that we are — and particularly is the migrant so driven our new — habitat is self-reinforcing and addictive.

SO AMERICAN MANIA IS SOMETHING OF A CAUTIONARY TALE?

In a way, that’s true. As a behavioral scientist, as I explored some of these ideas, I began to realize the potential gravity of America’s novel situation. The bubble of the 1990s, I concluded, was not an isolated aberration but the presenting symptom of a deeper malaise. The new environment that we have created in America (which in the book I have dubbed The Fast New World) is compelling, but also unique in human experience. And most important, it is potentially toxic for the individual and for our nation. Such an environment does not fit with our biological heritage, which is one forged amidst scarcity and deprivation. That is where our curiosity, social cleverness and reward driven ingenuity first excelled, and brought us to dominance. Now, thanks to our migrant zeal, in America the reverse may be happening.

Affluence and a culture of excessive individual reward — unless we understand and modulate it — have the potential to slowly destroy the vital infrastructure that makes for a stable social order and for human happiness. This is, I believe, an urgent social issue in America. Too many of us are now addicted to the treadmill we have created, and we are making ourselves sick. More of what we are doing is not enough (a truth from which the subtitle of the book — American Mania: When More is not Enough — springs). As a self-proclaimed “beacon of hope” for the rest of the world we have a responsibility to understand what is happening to our culture under these new circumstances.

AND WHAT IS YOUR MESSAGE IN AMERICAN MANIA?

American Mania is intended in a spirit of constructive, healing criticism. As a wake up call for those concerned about the extraordinary challenges and opportunities of our times. As we move to address the urgent social, economic and health issues that face our nation, as we surely will, I believe that a psychiatrist with knowledge of neurobiology — and a migrant who loves this country — can offer a unique perspective. I have lived in America now for about the same length of time that I spent in England as a younger man. After almost thirty years I have absorbed the habits and cultural mores of this great nation and believe strongly in the Enlightenment vision of human reason that gave it birth. But I also still have the perspective of an outsider, as did Alexis de Tocqueville (of whom I am a devotee) when writing Democracy in America just fifty years after the republic was born. America is a nation of extraordinary talent, but I believe our social experiment has now reached a critical stage. So, in this latest book I provide a diagnostic assessment of America 225 years out, controversial though it maybe, and offer what I hope is a healing prescription for my adoptive land. And there you have it: thus evolved American Mania.

Peter Whybrow, Plainfield NH, October 2004