A Schoolmate’s Death Makes Headlines 40 Years Later

Archie Brodsky contributed to this blog post, marking 46 years since we first shared a byline at Psychology Today when we co-authored “Interpersonal Heroin: Love Can Be an Addiction” in 1974.

New York Times columnist Jennifer Senior published an article a week ago titled: “Happiness Won’t Save You: Philip Brickman was an expert in the psychology of happiness, but he couldn’t make his own pain go away.” Since then, it has been among the most read articles in the newspaper. It has been circulated among many mental health groups.

Senior discusses Brickman’s suicide in 1982. I had been a graduate student in the joint social psychology program at the University of Michigan, which combined sociology and psychology; along with Brickman, other grads included such distinguished psychologists as Phil Shaver and Carol Tavris. The program dissolved before I received my grandfathered Ph.D. from it in 1973. The program’s two principal cofounders, Dan Katz (who was my dissertation chair) and Ted Newcomb, were the inspirations for the prestigious Katz-Newcomb lecture series.

For me, the program combined concerns for academic rigor and applied knowledge. Its focus was on investigating the impact of societal attitudes and social groups on individual psychology.

I knew Phil slightly. I ran into him at conferences, both after he graduated from Michigan (he entered before me) to join the psychology faculty at Northwestern, and then when he returned to Michigan to assume a research management position at the University’s famed Institute for Social Research (ISR).

I was aware of his most cited article in American Psychologist, “Models of Helping and Coping,” which appeared after his death. In it, he classified ways of thinking about emotional problems into a two-by-two square, based on whether or not people considered themselves responsible for their problems and whether or not they felt responsible for resolving these problems. Alcoholics Anonymous falls in the bottom-right quadrant: for AA, the sources of people’s problems are unknowable, and the means for resolving them uncontrollable.

Brilliant!

Personally, I had a sense that Brickman was not a happy man. So I didn’t understand the title of Senior’s article, “Happiness Won’t Save You.”

Instead, the article makes clear that Brickman was having problems both at his job and with his family. He was married and had three daughters; his wife was discontented about how his job was consuming his attention. Brickman had recently left his farm-like home outside of Ann Arbor and was living alone in a “grim, generic, one-bedroom apartment” in town.

Brickman was also getting professional help—according to Senior, when a friend referred him to a psychiatrist, “Brickman was already seeing a therapist, one of the best in Ann Arbor.” I don't know what approach this therapist took or which medications (if any) Brickman was on. But his fate doesn’t suggest that we were doing any better then than we are now. (Since the late 1990s, suicides have increased by a quarter, while the number of people taking antidepressants long-term has tripled.)

Here I provide the analysis of Archie Brodsky, my longtime colleague at the Program in Psychiatry and Law at Harvard Medical School:

It is remarkable that he’s being studied and discussed to this extent—exhumed, practically—so long after his death.

One clear intervention that (rationally) he should have been capable of was to give up his position as head of a division of ISR, for which he was unsuited, and concentrate on the research and writing at which he excelled and for which he was rewarded (to the extent that he could appreciate rewards instead of constantly downing himself).

But by then he probably was too anguished and demoralized to think straight about solutions. His marriage was coming apart, precipitated by his inadequacy and stress in the administrative job and exacerbated by his wife’s disaffection. It was a vicious spiral of causation.

Brickman had good friends on the Michigan faculty. None of them seemingly thought to encourage him to quit a job he wasn’t up to. Per Senior, “Brickman was unraveling in front of almost no one but psychologists. And none knew what to do.”

His failure at his job was evident—more than paranoia and insecurity. Again according to Senior, “His colleagues were forever giving him an earful.” A close woman colleague of his said, “He got consistent feedback that they were disappointed in him.” Yet, even after Brickman told this colleague and the one who recommended a psychiatrist, a man, that he was in trouble, suicidal, neither thought to advise him to—insist that he—leave his job.

“His two biggest commitments were his family and his work,” the male friend said. “And both of those seemed to be crumbling in front of him.”

Indeed, that combo would be devastating to virtually anyone. Of course, quitting a prestigious job is difficult. But after his wife had kicked him out of their home, so that he was living miserably, alone, without his three girls, and considering the alternative he warned he might take, wouldn’t this step be clearly dictated? Couldn’t higher-ups and administrative cohorts at ISR have been engaged in dealing with this life-threatening situation?

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I’m sorry to engage in Monday-morning therapeutic quarterbacking. But what Archie calls the exhuming of a decades-old case like this invites such input. Shouldn’t social psychologists at the University of Michigan have been able to fathom the connection between real-world situations and individual mental health? (By this point, as indicated above by my article in PT with Archie, I had personally transferred my attention to the social psychology of addiction.*)

After all, that’s what I thought we were taught to do at Michigan.

* I am completing a memoir of this transition (with Archie’s assistance): A Scientific Life on the Edge: My Quest to Change How We See Addiction.