Annie Dillard recounts a thought she had, after beginning to work with Kimon Nicolaides' book The Natural Way to Draw: “ One thing struck me as odd and interesting. A gesture drawing took forty five seconds; a Sustained Study took all morning. From any still-life arrangement or model’s pose, the artist could produce either a short study or a long one. Evidently, a given object took no particular amount of time to draw; instead the artist took the time, or didn’t take it, at pleasure. And, similarly, things themselves possessed no fixed and intrinsic amount of interest; instead things were interesting as long as you had attention to give them. How long does it take to draw a baseball mitt? As much time as you care to give it. Not an infinite amount of time, but more time than you first imagined. For many days, so long as you want to keep drawing that mitt, and studying that mitt, there will always be a new and finer layer of distinctions to draw out and lay in. Your attention discovers – seems thereby to produce – an array of interesting features in any object, like a lamp. An American Childhood, page 79.
I want to juxtapose this thought with a remark that strikes me as careless, from a piece by Gardiner Harris (“FDA Acknowledges Antidepressants Can Make Kids Suicidal”) of the New York Times, reprinted in the Strib on September 14, 2004: “The risk of suicide among patients given the medication is very small. If 100 children and teenagers are given anti-depressants, two or three will become suicidal who otherwise would not have, had they been given placebos, agency officials said. None of the children in the trials committed suicide, but some thought about or attempted suicide, researchers found.”
Let’s just give this bit of prose the attention Annie gave to her baseball mitt. Depressed teens, teens already prone to suicide, are given a medication and the researchers find that 2 or 3 out of a hundred move in the direction of suicide, who likely would not have moved in that direction without the medication. Is it interesting that none of the 2 or 3 succeed? Not particularly: the study would be monitoring people pretty closely. Somebody’s career ends if kids actually kill themselves in the study. Is 2 or 3 out of a hundred a small number? I should think the CIA would worry plenty, if an assassination strategy were projected to be successful 2 or 3 times out of a hundred. If 100,000 kids are taking this medication, that’s 1000 kids moving in the direction of suicide, without the helpful supervision of a monitoring study. The whole picture is complicated by the fact that this medication is supposed to, among other things, relieve depression and prevent suicide. Are there some figures about the effect of untreated depression in adolescents, to suggest that the net effect of anti-depressant use is positive?
Journalism had better be a meditative discipline, like drawing a baseball glove, or people get hurt.
Posted by shea0017 at September 17, 2004 3:52 PM