Love at Goon Park (35 page)

If the standard housing—one monkey to a cage—produced selfdestructive behaviors, total isolation created far worse ones. Here, indeed, was psychopathology. These semiparalyzed monkeys, not surprisingly, were incapable of having normal sexual relations—of having any relations at all. When the lab crew had figured out a way to strap the dysfunctional females into a “receptive” position, they managed to induce a few pregnancies in already unstable monkeys. The result was an extreme reminder of just how dangerous an animal who has no “social intelligence” can be. “Not even in our most devious dreams could we have designed a surrogate as evil as these real monkey mothers,” wrote Harry. “These monkey mothers that had never experienced love of any kind were devoid of love for infants, a lack of feeling unfortunately shared by all too many human counterparts.” Most of the loveless mothers just ignored their infants. Unfortunately, not all did. One held her infant's face to the floor and chewed off his feet and fingers. Another took her baby's head in her mouth and crushed it. That was the end of the forced pregnancies.

So, Harry had evil mothers. He had crazy monkeys. He had unhappy and socially bizarre youngsters. But he still didn't see classic depression, that undeniable slump into misery. The researchers in his lab had created grief and loneliness and misery. But Harry was still looking for something more definitive, that paralyzing sense of life's being just too much, that state of being when air itself can feel as weighted as stone. “Depression in humans has been characterized as a state of helplessness and hopelessness, sunken in a well of despair,” Harry explained. And that's what still seemed to elude him, that slide down into the bottom of the pit. Perhaps, he thought, they hadn't yet made their monkeys feel helpless enough.

This idea that depression springs partly from a sense of being trapped—a prisoner who has no escape—was just beginning to surface in psychology. While working with rats, scientists had found that if they exposed the rodents to inescapable electric shocks, so that no matter what they did the rats could not get away from that unpleasant jolt, the animals would visibly give up. The researchers could
watch the rats collapse in what looked like a furry heap of despair. Later, in the 1970s, clinical psychologist Martin Seligman would begin developing such reactions into a theory of “learned helplessness” and the way that being stripped of power—or seeing yourself as so powerless—infiltrates every response. Seligman would come to believe that learned helplessness can drive not only depression but also the angry, lost behaviors often associated with it. He would also develop this understanding into the more positive notion of “learned optimism.” Seligman was particularly interested in helping people achieve that sense of control and the buoyant sense of well-being and purposefulness that can follow.

Harry wasn't thinking about optimism at all. Quite the opposite. It was the bleaker aspects of learned helplessness that interested him because they seemed to lead toward his goal of true depression. And so he tried another approach. “Again, this was on the inspiration of Bowlby,” Suomi says. “Bowlby had described the effect of separating the infant and the mother, the protest and the despair. Back in 1962, Harry had replicated that and Robert Hinde had as well. There was a flurry of mother-infant separation studies. They found the monkeys responded pretty much like Bowlby described but not as severely. The effects were transient. And then Harry came back from Mayo and he had an idea for a chamber that he thought might be useful.” Technically, Harry called his design a “vertical chamber apparatus.” It was shaped like a narrow inverted pyramid, wider at the top and slanting downward to a point. The monkey was placed in the point, at the bottom of those steep, slippery sides. The wide opening was covered with a mesh. The apparatus worked, as they say, perfectly. The monkeys would spend the first day or two trying to escape, scrambling up the steep sides so that they could look out. This took a lot of energy, though, with the constant sliding and slipping to gain a brief glimpse of the outside. After two or three days, “most subjects typically assume a hunched position in a corner of the bottom of the apparatus. One might presume at this point that they find their situation to be hopeless.”

Harry had another name for the vertical chamber; he called it a pit of despair. His colleagues and students tried to persuade him to stay with the technical description. They warned him that it would be politically easier to use less inflammatory, less visual—perhaps less candid—descriptions. “He first wanted to call it a dungeon of despair,” says Sackett. “Can you imagine the reaction to that?”

It didn't really matter what you called the apparatus because what really mattered was how it worked—which turned out to be terrifyingly well. You could take a perfectly happy monkey, drop it into the chamber, and bring out a perfectly hopeless animal within half a week. As part of his doctoral dissertation, Steve Suomi ran some of the vertical-chamber tests. As Suomi wrote, in 1970, the chamber changed every monkey who went into it for the worse. It could make abnormal monkeys pathological, make normal monkeys abnormal. The researchers couldn't find even one macaque who seemed to have any defenses against it. Indeed, the pit was a powerful reminder that even a healthy normal childhood doesn't protect against the effects of depression.

In a sense, what the vertical chamber showed, instead, was how naturally we become dependent on the society of others. We live by our intake of oxygen, food, water, and companionship. The monkeys who went into the pit had grown up accustomed to company. “The chamber involved breaking a period of socialization,” Suomi explains. Most of the chambered monkeys were at least three months old. They were kept in the vertical chamber for maybe a month, no more than six weeks. The whole point was to take animals who had an established bond—and then break it.

In total, less than a dozen monkeys went into the pit. Two of the animals came from Peggy's nuclear family project. They fared no better than any of the others. When they returned to the lively, friendly hubbub of the family neighborhood, they seemed unable to reconnect. They were withdrawn, slow to respond to others. “Before separation, they had been among the most socially active and dominant of the nuclear family offspring,” Harry wrote. Now they were
quiet little loners. The monkeys looked—at last—like an undeniable animal model of depression. They looked like animals lost in that hell of loneliness Harry had been working so hard to re-create.

“His work on depression was like a personal metaphor,” says Charles Snowdon, then a fairly junior member of the faculty and now head of the Wisconsin psychology department. “He was very depressed in the days of Margaret's cancer. I was brought on as an examiner with Steve Suomi's dissertation and they were using the vertical chambers.” Snowdon was appalled by the design of the chambers. “I asked Steve why, why were they using these? And Harry spoke up. He said, ‘Because that's how it feels when you're depressed.'”

Once they had a model of depression, of course, the charge was to repair the damage. The primate researchers began working with a university psychiatrist, William McKinney. “I basically started my research career in Harry's lab,” says McKinney, now director of Northwestern University's Asher Center for Study and Treatment of Depressive Disorders. With McKinney's help, they began probing for the biochemistry behind the disorder.

In one early test, McKinney dosed the monkeys with reserpine, a compound that suppresses serotonin in the brain. Today, of course, we know that one way to treat depression is to boost serotonin levels, keep them elevated in the brain, and some of the best-known modern antidepressants and antianxiety drugs—Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil—employ that approach. But first, researchers had to figure out that serotonin had an influence on depression. The tests at Wisconsin belonged to the discovery period. Monkeys taking reserpine suddenly began to huddle, and their heads drooped as the serotonin levels fell. They were a living demonstration of the neurotransmitter's potency. Who wouldn't watch them and wonder how directly the brain chemistry of serotonin affected mood and whether it could be manipulated?

That's not to say that the scientists in the Wisconsin primate lab made the Prozac connection. They were still trying to figure out
whether they even had the right chemistry and what it meant. Harry and his colleagues continued treating depression in monkeys with then-current approaches, testing medications. The researchers found that the existing therapies had definite limits, couldn't break fully through that shell of apathetic misery. The monkeys were, maybe, a little more active, but still withdrawn. They still seemed separate from companions and family. The lab could induce depression, all right, but its scientists seemed a long way from repairing their destructive handiwork.

They were beginning to wonder, though, whether there might be a kind of social feedback loop to depression. You could induce it by ruthlessly removing social contact. Could you then alleviate it also by social means? Perhaps the antidote to taking love away was simply giving it back. One of the most guiding principles in Harry's laboratory was that there was no justification for damaging an animal unless part of the test was to learn how to fix the problem. If one relationship damaged you, could others repair the injury? The Wisconsin laboratory had been working to answer that question for years, ever since cloth mom had proved to be so dismal at raising her charges, ever since Bowlby had pointed out to Harry that loneliness can be next to craziness.

It was Harry's graduate student, Leonard Rosenblum, who devised one of the more compelling tests of the healing powers of friendship. He hauled cloth mom back into the surrogate business and had her raise another four little monkeys. But Rosenblum allowed his infants into a larger circle. Although their home was with cloth mom, for thirty minutes a day, five days a week, they had a play date. His little monkeys rapidly became friends; they were
thrilled
to see each other. When they grew up, they looked nothing like the earlier offspring of cloth mom. They were socially adept, even what you might call normal—outgoing, socially skilled, and group-savvy. Rosenblum compared those surrogate-raised monkeys with youngsters brought up by living mothers. The second group also had playdate time. “What was surprising to everyone was that there wasn't
much difference between the two groups,” Suomi says. “Every monkey raised by surrogate sucked its thumb. But they could play and get along. When you added in the time with playmates, they became relatively normal monkeys. They had normal patterns of play, they were pretty good parents, they were functional.” Other studies showed that if you extended the playtime, you increased the positive effects. If developing monkeys had some chance at normal relationships, they could overcome some of the deficits of life with cloth mom. The healing effects of friendship only emphasized, by contrast, the desperate position of the isolated monkeys.

“The isolates were horribly deficient,” Suomi says. “And it was very hard to reverse that.” Their next idea occurred at the end of lunch one day, he recalls, yet another session when Harry and his grad students were drinking coffee and tossing out ideas. The isolate monkeys needed a lot of contact to make the turn back to normal. It needed to be gentle contact, steady, soft, friendly. The isolates' normal peers tended to attack these oddball monkeys and then ignore them. But what about really little monkeys, who were almost compulsive clingers, who would adoringly cuddle even with bug-faced cloth mother? Maybe they just hadn't tried the right monkeys. So they matched the isolates with three-month-old youngsters, the most determined cuddlers on the face of the earth. These were the same age as those little monkeys who tried to woo brass-spike mom, who peered lovingly through the Butler box window at their cloth mother. Suomi thought there was another advantage to these baby “peer therapists.” They were just starting to become interested in play; they might be able to engage the isolated monkeys in that as well.

To start, the scientists put the baby therapists and the isolated monkeys together for two hours a day. It was almost like watching a peculiar game of tag. The little animals would approach, the older isolates would back nervously away. Again and again, until the unnerved isolates huddled into a corner, heads down, rocking. And then the little therapists would cuddle against them, clinging and stroking. They would repeat this dance until the isolates began to lose their sense of
being threatened and became interested instead. Until, slowly, they began responding, just plain old monkey to monkey.

It was Suomi who worked out most of this program for the six-month isolates. With “therapy,” the majority could be coaxed back to a functional life. “The only individuals to suffer prolonged distress from these experimental efforts were the experimenters,” Harry wrote, in a rare, tacit acknowledgment of how hard it could be to watch a monkey struggle toward a normal social life. But the longer the monkeys were isolated, the harder it was to bring them back. One of the bitterest—and most important—lessons of the isolation experiments is that social skills rust when not used. “Six months of isolation was right on the critical edge of recovery,” Suomi says. If the researchers went to a year of isolation, the animals seemed almost warped beyond repair, twisted into creatures that were no longer really rhesus macaques. One baby animal fainted the first time a scientist held him—the sense of warm, living touch was so alien and so terrifying.