A First-Rate Madness (14 page)

Jesse Jackson recalls that King mentioned in meetings that he felt depressed, that perhaps he should resign, that he had achieved his life's work and should now retire. But new challenges soon showed themselves: responding to the radicalization of black youth, and fighting the rise in domestic and foreign violence (especially the Vietnam War).

In the two years before his death, King spoke out against the war, antagonized President Johnson and his liberal allies in the Democratic Party, and confronted young black radicals. He turned his focus from racism to poverty, and overtly advanced a socialist agenda. This MLK was too radical for many, too conservative for some. He was increasingly damned, and increasingly depressed—not just sad, but clinically depressed.

Historian Stephen Oates recounts King's mental state at the time:

Just before his death, King visited New York for private meetings with liberal and radical supporters, among them Bayard Rustin, Harry Wachtel, and Bernard Lee. Oates describes what happened:

Alvin Poussaint, a psychiatrist who had marched with King repeatedly (and stayed in touch with him in the final years), saw a changed man:

THE
COURSE
OF DEPRESSION is episodic and repetitive. The severe periods of melancholy come and go, and they usually happen more than once or twice in a lifetime. Looking for other periods of clinical depression (besides adolescence and the final years), I believe there's evidence of at least one other episode.

In 1959, three years after beginning his public life, King felt depleted: “What I have been doing is giving, giving, giving, and not stopping to retreat and meditate like I should—to come back. If the situation is not changed, I will be a physical and psychological wreck. I have to reorganize my personality and reorient my life. I have been too long in the crowd, too long in the forest.” King's state met the definition of clinical depression: he was sad in his mood, uninterested in his usual activities, low in energy, unable to concentrate, suffering from insomnia, and had increased appetite (gaining twenty pounds; physicians told him that too much stress was making him ill). Those symptoms, in an average man, would be diagnosed as a major depressive episode.

Thus the course of his illness supports a depressive disease: probable episodes with suicide attempts in adolescence, another episode at age thirty, and a final one at age thirty-eight. While it is true that we can attribute external causes to each of these episodes, as we can with most mental illnesses, it's important to bear in mind that such apparent “causes” are neither necessary nor sufficient. The
recurrence
of episodes indicates an underlying biological
susceptibility
to depression; this susceptibility is, in essence, mental illness.

 

 

AT KING'S SIDE during many a march walked a young doctor with a black bag. Stand close to King, Andrew Young told the young volunteer for the Medical Committee for Human Rights. Never be more than a few people away. Inside the bag, Dr. Alvin Poussaint carried first aid material, in case King was shot. Poussaint also provided medical and psychological support for the marchers. A medical car (usually Poussaint's own car with an affixed red cross) trailed each march.

Dr. Poussaint, now a child psychiatry professor at Harvard, gave me a firsthand assessment of King's mental state in the final years of his life. Poussaint knew Dr. King reasonably well from the marches. He recalls an intense period of interaction with King in 1966 during the Meredith march, the beginning of the end of the civil rights movement. “King had a fearlessness about him. . . . He set the pace in marches, he was strolling, not walking fast, nor slow, but strolling, and always right in the front line, which put him at risk. Anyone could run out from the bushes and shoot him.” Poussaint describes how terribly afraid he was many times during the marches, but how King always maintained his composure. Once King marched to a courthouse in Philadelphia, Mississippi, after some civil rights workers had been killed. He was met by two sheriffs on the sidewalk. Don't take another step, one of them said; they had their hands on their guns. “King was standing there, with his chest out, like he always stood. I thought he was going to walk onto the lawn, and they would then beat or kill him and us.” King knelt on the ground to pray, and everyone around him did the same. Says Poussaint, “You have to realize there was a constant sense of fear on those marches. The marchers never knew if and when they might be attacked or even killed, and since they were enjoined never to fight back, they sometimes felt like lambs going to sacrifice. This constant fear was an extreme test of character, one which King passed, while others . . . did not.”

Poussaint emphasizes that even in the face of all this anxiety, fear, and violence, King projected an abnormally calm sense of “serenity” and “peacefulness.” Some of this may have been a show, to buck up his followers; in private, King would drink and get tipsy, or engage in hilarious jesting. Poussaint did not observe hyperthymic personality traits, such as being hyperactive, talking or walking fast. In fact, he saw the reverse: “He talked slow, and even walked slow, not only during marches, but I remember walking casually with him, just chatting, about nothing of consequence, and he walked slowly.” Poussaint was unaware of King's adolescent suicide attempts, and when asked what he thinks as a child psychiatrist now, he replied, “It sounds like an impulsive grief reaction. I'll join [my grandmother] who's dead. I agree that one would be more likely to do that if depressed already.” Despite the possibility of an adolescent period of depression, Poussaint doubted, from his own experiences and from speaking to others in King's circle, that Dr. King suffered from much depression otherwise.

I think we can conclude from the firsthand observations of Dr. Poussaint, and from the historical record, that—unlike Gandhi—King did not have a baseline dysthymic personality (with sadness, shyness, anxiety, and introversion). He was not chronically depressed. But, exactly as with Gandhi, King experienced at least three probable depressive episodes in the beginning, middle, and end of his life, the first associated with suicide attempts.

Of the four diagnostic validators of mental illness, symptoms and course both point toward depressive illness, but we can say nothing about
genetics
and
treatment
. Regarding genetics, King's family is private, and the presence or absence of psychiatric diagnoses among family members is not publicly available knowledge. Regarding treatment, during his final depression, some of King's aides urged their leader to get psychiatric help, but he never did so.

 

 

AS WITH GANDHI, King's depression may well have generated his politics of radical empathy. In fact, King drew an analogy between his politics and psychiatric treatment: the patient was America; the disease was racism. For example, in a 1957 interview with journalist Martin Agronsky, King said, “Psychologists would say that a guilt complex can lead to two reactions. One is repentance and the desire to change. The other reaction is to indulge in more of the very thing that you have the sense of guilt about. And I think we find these two reactions. I think much of the violence that we notice in the South at this time is really the attempt to compensate, drown the sense of guilt, by indulging in more of the very thing that causes the sense of guilt.” Agronsky asked, “You really feel that, you prefer to make this sort of a psychiatric interpretation?” King replied, “Yes.”

This view was widely held in King's circle, most explicitly by James Bevel, who, as Andrew Young recounted, “put our outrage into perspective when he said that we had to become ‘political psychiatrists' and view our oppressors as our patients. ‘A psychiatrist doesn't get angry with his patients when they are violent towards him; the doctor must help his patients to realize that their violence grows out of sickness and insecurity. We must help them, not hate them.' ” (Bevel's insight was hard earned: his behavior was erratic, and his colleagues unsuccesfully tried to commit him more than once to mental hospitals.) Alvin Poussaint confirms that the movement leaders saw their mission this way: “By nonviolence, we were trying to cure white people of a sickness. . . . Nonviolence, [King] always said, was a way of life, not just a political movement. It was the way you treat other people. I felt he was trying to model it [in his personal demeanor].”

King's nonviolent movement was a cure for racism, not a political strategy. Like many treatments, it has healed rather than cured, leaving scars behind. It was a medical metaphor, a political psychiatry, based on the healing power of empathy.

But what was the treatment? How exactly does empathy heal? When faced with injustice, King taught, there are three options: violent resistance, nonviolent resistance, and acquiescence. Resistance of any kind is preferable to acquiescence (which is why Gandhi and King weren't pacifists; they didn't oppose violence under all circumstances), but violent resistance usually fails to achieve its goals. What is the nonviolent resistance option?
Loving
your enemies, King instructed, is not about actually
being in love
with another (the Greeks called this
eros,
“a sort of aesthetic or romantic love”), nor is it about even
liking
another (
philia,
“a reciprocal love and the intimate affection between friends”): it is about having goodwill toward another (
agape,
“understanding and creative, redemptive good will for all men”). The difference between
agape
and
philia
is why Jesus counseled us to
love,
not
like,
our enemies. Despite hate, anger, harm, spite, one reacts with goodwill, seeking to appreciate the good in others, trying to see another's perspective. King insisted that this goodwill is redemptive: by treating others this way, we change them.

 

 

A SKEPTICAL READER might say: Empathy is fine, but King and Gandhi certainly seem like idealists. If depression entails both realism and empathy, where is the realism? This attitude is understandable today. The Martin Luther King of popular mythology is a cardboard icon, brought out once a year on a holiday, with little resemblance to the real historical man. The cardboard King was a pacificist idealist; he wanted everyone to make peace and hold hands. The real King was an aggressive, confrontational realist; he believed that all men were evil in part, including himself; he thought that violence was everywhere and unavoidable, including within himself. “Nonviolence” did not mean the absence of violence, but the control of violence so that it was directed inward rather than outward.

These are not my views; these are the explicit views of Gandhi and King, as I will show, and they are a reflection of their realistic views of evil and aggression as part of human nature. During a Howard University conference on nonviolence in 1963, the comments of Jerome Frank, a prominent psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins, represent an example of the misinterpretation of King's attitude toward violence: