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E-mail Linked to Prozac?
Trevor Butterworth, April 17, 2007
A correlation that can be turned on its head.

Robert Wright has a whimsical theory, which he expounds in an op-ed in today’s New York Times: “the more e-mail there is, the more Prozac there will be, and the more Prozac there is, the more e-mail there will be.”

The point seems to be that the instantaity, the profligacy of forwarding of e-mail drives anomie: we begin to make all manner of depressive judgments about the actual nature of these virtual relationships.

“By ending the need to coordinate schedules, it lets us interact with lots of people – and interact along such narrow channels that we skip the bother of getting to know an entire human being.”

And the absence of deep human contact is a spur to pharmacological intervention.

But one could look at it from another direction, which is that the mass penetration of e-mail and cell phones means that we are always available – or expected to be available – for work, for meaningless exchanges about Lindsey Lohan, for spam, and that what we are in most dire need of is the tranquility of solitude, from which a different kind of pharmacological intervention derives its name.

But not too much tranquility, or else one may find oneself equally alone, much like people were years ago in the pre-telephone epistolary age, waiting for their letter – any letter – to arrive, and hitting the laudanum.

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