A First-Rate Madness (12 page)

Each man is now sanctified in the public mind, but few of us really appreciate them for who they were, for their weaknesses as well as their strengths, for the rejection they faced during their lives, and the depression they repeatedly endured and—in their empathy for others' suffering—ultimately overcame.

 

 

 

Mahatma Gandhi was depressed. He also pioneered the politics of nonviolent resistance. I believe these two facts are related. His global impact is well known, but his depression is less so. As we'll see in this chapter, he suffered from at least three major depressive episodes, and he had a dysthymic personality, an abnormal temperament of chronic mild depression and anxiety, which is genetically and biologically related to severe depressive illness.

To say that Gandhi was mentally unusual is not news. The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson saw the Mahatma's inclusive and peaceful approach as a “maternal” politics, related to his identification with his mother. Such psychoanalytic speculation aside, no historian has seriously examined the potential effects of Gandhi's depression on his politics and worldview.

 

 

FIRST, LET'S QUICKLY ESTABLISH the fact of Gandhi's depression, using the four indicators we've used earlier in this book: symptoms, genetics, course of illness, and treatment. Beginning with
symptoms,
Gandhi clearly suffered a severe depressive episode in the final two years of his life. He was open about this bout of depression, even mentioning it in his speeches. Most historians attribute this episode to disillusionment with Hindu-Muslim partition. It may not be so simple. Said one aide, “I watched day after day the wan, sad look on that pinched face, bespeaking an inner anguish that was frightening to behold.” Another aide noted that he “was literally praying that God should gather him into his bosom and deliver him from the agony which life had become.”

This final severe depression was preceded by what likely was Gandhi's first depressive episode as a teenager, during which he attempted suicide. In his 1931
Autobiography,
Gandhi himself describes this incident (unlike Martin Luther King, who similarly attempted suicide in adolescence but never wrote or spoke about it publicly). Yet the Mahatma may have concealed more than he revealed. He downplayed the event, focused more on the shame of stealing cigarettes than the suicide attempt. Erikson, for one, took Gandhi's cue when summarizing the Mahatma's childhood:

Erikson skips quickly over the suicide attempt, which he further minimizes by putting it in quotes. Here, cited in full, is what Gandhi himself wrote about it, admitting what happened while at the same time explaining it away. First he describes how he and a friend smoked cigarettes surreptitiously, and even began to steal money to pay for the secret habit:

Gandhi proceeds to describe how he confessed to his ailing father:

Gandhi clearly meant to minimize the suicide attempt, ascribing it to adolescent impulsivity and peer pressure. Such denial is facile, but the statistics suggest that any teenage suicide attempt should be taken seriously: only about 2 percent of children try to kill themselves, which shows that it is hardly a normal adolescent act. Indeed, 90 percent of children who attempt suicide have a psychiatric disorder, most commonly clinical depression.

Based on these facts, it is highly likely that Gandhi experienced depression during his adolescence, which manifested in a suicide attempt. Given that he ended his life with another depressive episode, it is statistically probable that Gandhi suffered from episodic depression throughout his life. This probability is confirmed by a careful study of his life.

Though he wrote letters continually, gave many speeches, and penned innumerable newspaper articles—constituting in total about ninety volumes of collected works—Gandhi provided little detail about his moods. Thus, between the severe depressive periods that bracketed his adult life, Gandhi himself provides sparse psychiatric evidence. But what evidence we have is consistent with dysthymia, or chronic mild depression (or possibly, given some hypersexuality, cyclothymia).

Throughout his life Gandhi was anxious, extremely shy, and prone to negative and pessimistic moods. In his
Autobiography,
he gives glimpses of these dysthymic traits, especially in young adulthood. Speaking of his high school years, he writes, “I was a coward. I used to be haunted by the fears of thieves, ghosts, and serpents. I did not dare to stir out of doors at night. Darkness was a terror to me. . . . I could not therefore bear to sleep without a light in the room.” Of his twenties studying law in London: “I always felt tongue-tied. [A British vegetarian society colleague commented], ‘You talk to me quite all right, but why is it that you never open your lips at a committee meeting? You are a drone.' . . . Not that I never felt tempted to speak. But I was at a loss how to express myself. . . . Even when I paid a social call the presence of half a dozen or more people would strike me dumb.” This kind of social anxiety is typical of depression. For Gandhi, it was constant and chronic, as happens with dysthymic personalities: “It was only in South Africa that I got over this shyness, though I never completely overcame it. It was impossible for me to speak impromptu. I hesitated whenever I had to face strange audiences and avoided making a speech whenever I could. Even today I do not think I could or would even be inclined to keep a meeting of friends engaged in idle talk.”

Dysthymia increases the chances of becoming severely depressed when stressful events happen, as in Gandhi's later years, and as occurred when he became physically ill. The vegetarian Mahatma refused most medications because of their animal origins. In his mid-forties, he had dysentery, a medical problem that quickly devolved into a psychiatric crisis, complete with suicidal thoughts. “I felt the illness was bound to be prolonged and possibly fatal. . . . One night I gave myself up to despair. I felt that I was at death's door. . . . [His doctor said,] ‘Your pulse is quite good. I see absolutely no danger. This is a nervous breakdown due to extreme weakness.' But I was far from being reassured. I passed the night without sleep. The morning broke without death coming. But I could not get rid of the feeling that the end was near. . . . I was incapable of reading. I was hardly inclined to talk. The slightest talk meant a strain on the brain. All interest in living had ceased.” Ultimately, he got over his dysentery and his depression.

Gandhi made virtues out of necessities. For instance, he saw his natural shyness as encouraging spiritually useful silence. Similarly, he interpreted his introversion as reflecting the ascetic virtues of detachment from the material world. He made even his crankiest, strangest qualities into exemplary behaviors. His obsession with sexual abstinence, his insistence on making his own clothes, his rejection of the material comforts of Western life all were celebrated as the self-abnegation of the ascetic who devoted himself single-mindedly to the battle for justice and peace. Not coincidentally, these values also harmonize with his dysthymic personality.

 

 

GIVEN HIS LIFELONG depressive symptoms, the
course
of Gandhi's illness is also consistent with dysthymic personality, superimposed by a few major depressive episodes, probably at least three (adolescence, his mid-forties, and the end of his life). Of the four indicators of depression, only treatment cannot be applied to the Mahatma because he rejected most Western treatments, and in any case, few were available during his lifetime.

A more telling line of diagnostic evidence is
genetics
. Here we are faced with the unfortunate life of Gandhi's eldest son, Harilal, mentioned only once in the Mahatma's autobiography. During his life, Harilal caused Gandhi much pain; he did everything his father famously disavowed. Harilal converted to Islam briefly, ate meat, visited prostitutes, drank alcohol, and committed petty crimes such as embezzlement. In an open letter, Harilal accused Gandhi of ignoring his children's well-being, as when Gandhi refused Harilal's request to study law in London, as the Mahatma himself had done.

Most historians have blamed these problems on an eldest son's defiance toward a famous father. No historian has made a different suggestion: perhaps Harilal was mentally ill. He was clearly an alcoholic: he became homeless and destitute toward the end of his life, and he died of cirrhosis in his sixties. When Harilal attended Gandhi's funeral, the haggard, dirty son went unrecognized. Two months later, he died in a tuberculosis sanitarium, though he did not have tuberculosis. (Such sanitaria were also used in India to house the mentally ill.)

Gandhi's many descendants are not public regarding the presence of mental illness in the family. But if Gandhi's own depression, and his son's fate, indicate mental illness, it is quite possible that others in the family have suffered the same illness.

IF GANDHI INDEED suffered from depressive episodes and a dysthymic personality, we can ask how this depression might have influenced his politics. There is, as we've seen, a connection between depression and empathy. One sees the psychological concept of empathy prominently displayed in many of Gandhi's political statements. For instance:

Both his allies and his enemies imposed limits on their love; Gandhi struggled to expand those limits. He tried to persuade Indians to value their British rulers even while they sought to free themselves from British rule; he attempted to sway his Hindu followers to respect the Untouchable caste and to live tolerantly with Indian Muslims.

Despite failing in the end to preserve a united India, he never compromised his method of radical empathy: “We can do nothing without Hindu-Moslem unity and without killing the snake of untouchability. . . . No man of God can consider another man as inferior to himself. He must consider every man as his blood brother. It is the cardinal principle of every religion.”

He realized that empathy was the secret ingredient of nonviolence: