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ANXIETYSingleminded

By DIANA SPECHLER

 JUNE 26, 2015 7:05 AM June 26, 2015 7:05 am 44 Comments

Anxiety: We worry. A gallery of contributors count the ways.

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I’m almost unmedicated. Each morning, I take just 100 milligrams of bupropion. At bedtime, I take a quarter milligram of lorazepam. I’ve eliminated trazodone. And I’m single. My ex and I are friends again — we were friends for years before we dated — and now that my heartbreak has receded, I don’t miss the upstream swim of that relationship. I still pop awake in the middle of the night, and often stay awake for two or three hours, but there’s a peacefulness to my days now. Summer is helping. It always does.

My worst depression comes not from heartbreak, but from feeling trapped. Yet I’ve sought out relationships again and again.For the first time since age 12, I’m not engaged in the compulsive relationship pattern that those close to me have often questioned, that I’ve often questioned, too: I neither have a serious boyfriend nor want one. I spend a lot of time thinking about one man (it’s hard to imagine quitting that vice), but he’s 2,600 miles away without a working phone or a passport.

I didn’t make a conscious decision to take a hiatus from serial monogamy. At other times in my life, I have tried militantly to stay single, knowing that a steady stream of boyfriends is not the antidote to depression, but I’ve always wound up panicking and tumbling into a relationship. I just feel something different now, as if a cord that’s usually pulled tight has slackened.

I’ve been single for only four months; I don’t deserve a medal or induction into a convent, but it’s interesting to me that as I decrease my meds, the urgency I feel around men subsides.

•

Nothing has troubled me more consistently than romantic love. “You’re afraid to be alone,” I’ve been told, and that’s true. But then again, isn’t it true of most people? Aren’t we taught from a young age to fear that?

Between relationships, I always forget love’s shortcomings, envision it to be something magical and curative. I forget about the annoying parts — the beloved clipping his toenails in bed. I forget about the darkness — that the beloved might suffer from depression, too; that the beloved might face tragedy or sleep with someone else. In her memoir, “The Odd Woman and The City,” Vivian Gornick describes her decision to give up romantic love: “It haunted the psyche, was an ache in the bones; so deeply embedded in the makeup of the spirit, it hurt the eyes to look directly into its influence. It would be a cause of pain and conflict for the rest of my life.”

For me, it is a cause of pain just as surely as it’s a distraction from pain — love is all meshed up with my depression. I’m sick with anxiety when I fall for someone, unsure if he loves me back, but simultaneously, I’ve often relied on that crazed feeling to take me out of my own head. I find it endlessly sad that the falling-in-love sensation is fleeting; even sadder is the crash that inevitably follows, when real life must be faced.

The end of a relationship is a kind of high, too — there’s nothing more life-affirming, more hope-inspiring, than a fresh start. After my first long-term relationship unraveled, I started running. I would wake at five in the morning and run while the world slept. I would run until I vomited. I couldn’t get enough. I was so excited, so energized, that walking felt like sitting still.

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CreditYann Kebbi

My worst depression comes not from heartbreak, but from feeling trapped. Relationships, even those with the best beginnings, often infuse me with a sense of entrapment. And yet, I’ve sought them out again and again, certain that if I find the right one, it will open a window and let the fresh air in while all of my problems fly out.

According to popular culture, to be a single woman is either pathetic or empowering. On television, single women are either eating ice cream and crying or drinking cosmopolitans with their spirited girlfriends and trashing the men they go to bed with. Historically, my singledom has erred more on the side of pathetic — I never fail to make leaps of logic, including “No one will ever love me again.” But this time is different. I wouldn’t say I feel empowered, but I am finding single life relaxing. I should have figured this out years ago, what my friends have always told me — that I don’t need a relationship. I’m reminded of the time a woman stopped me on the street to point out that I was the only person with an open umbrella, that it hadn’t been raining for quite some time; I was so happy to collapse that thing, to shove it into my bag, to finally have my hands free.

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I always want to reiterate how grateful I am for meds, how meds saved my life. But as I taper, I do have a sense that I’m floating gently back to reality, that I’ve been separated from reality for years, that reality is greeting me. Reality is surprisingly tolerable — I can live on tiny doses of medication and I can live without a boyfriend. In the past month and a half, I’ve been experiencing intense laughing jags. I’ll start laughing about something semi-funny and find myself unable to stop. Sometimes I laugh so hard, I cry or get a cramp. It is the best feeling I’ve ever had. That laughter is restoring something inside me, or restoring me to the world. Someone close to me who kicked a heroin habit told me he had the same experience when he was getting clean.

RELATEDMore From Going OffRead previous contributions to this series.I met the man who lives 2,600 miles away while I was spending the month of May in Mexico. One night, after we’d been friends only a few days, I stayed out late with him and couldn’t get home to my meds because the buses had stopped running. I was terrified by the prospect of spending a night without lorazepam. I could hardly speak as we walked three miles along the highway to his house. Every shadow looked alive. The occasional headlights assaulted my vision. My whole body trembled. The source of my fear felt nebulous, and so I was afraid of everything.In his living room, he showed me to an air mattress on the floor, and then went outside to the garden. When he returned, he arranged rosemary beside my face. He laid rose petals on my sweaty palms, said something about my chakras. I felt itchy and squirmy. My stomach hurt. Could I trust this person? Who was he anyway? I kept thinking of Francisco Goldman’s New Yorker series about those 43 missing students. Wasn’t Mexico dangerous? Weren’t men?

His dog climbed on top of me and licked my face, chin to forehead. He kept licking me until I started to laugh. My friend was laughing, too. “Leave her alone!” he yelled at the dog. “She’s trying to be depressed!”

I hesitate to share to what happened next. I don’t want to sound like those television shows I was criticizing — the final frame where the single woman struts confidently down the sidewalk. I don’t want to admit that my emotions, which I’ve always hailed as complicated, sharpened to a clear and simple point: I was going to be O.K., I realized. Not just on this air mattress while I waited for the buses to start running, but in a grander sense — soon I was going to be meds-free and I was going to survive it.

When the sun broke through the dark and turned the sky lavender, my friend and I walked outside. We ran into his neighbors, who offered us a ride to my place. We climbed into the back of their pickup truck.

“How are you feeling?” he asked as we sped over the cobblestones.

There was wind on our faces. It’s almost impossible to feel bad when there’s wind on your face and the day’s just beginning. To our right, the lake unfurled, a ribbon of blue. Beyond it, the mountains zigzagged against the sky. In a few minutes, I would say goodbye to the men, hop out of the truck, and be alone with myself and my unmedicated thoughts.

I remember that before I answered, I was curious to hear how these words would sound because I was going to mean them: “I’m fine.”

Read the entire Going Off series here.

Diana Spechler is the author of the novels “Who by Fire” and “Skinny.” Twitter: @DianaSpechler.

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 SEARCHTHE CONVERSATION

Political InfectionsBy DAVID BROOKS and GAIL COLLINS

 OCTOBER 28, 2014 8:50 PM October 28, 2014 8:50 pm 175 Comments

In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.

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Barack Obama hugs the nurse and Ebola survivor Nina Pham in the Oval Office on Oct. 24.Credit Pool photo by Olivier Douliery

Gail Collins: David, I was pretty confident that the United States had Ebola under control until the other day, when it appeared policy-making had devolved to Andrew Cuomo and Chris Christie. Chris Christie, who can’t keep bridge traffic moving. Andrew Cuomo, who failed to get his 2012 flu shot until 2013.

David Brooks: This is why we’re a republic and not a democracy. People running for office should not be making science policy. By the way, I’ve been against quarantines and overreaction through this whole thing, but there was a piece in The New Republic a few weeks ago that sobered me. Steven Beutler, an infectious disease specialist, was arguing for a maximalist response. Here’s one core point: “Medicine can be a very humbling profession, and after more than 30 years of practicing infectious-disease medicine, I have learned that the ‘unanticipated’ happens all too often, especially where microbes are involved.”

Gail: Do you think the Ebola hysteria will have any effect on next week’s election? There’s been a lot of complaint about the administration’s ineptitude. But I think the message on Ebola, at least, has been the opposite. Ebola in the United States began deep in the heart of Texas, a state whose health care system is so estranged from the federal government it refuses to accept the opportunity to get its millions of uninsured residents covered under Obamacare.

David: Your love of all things Texas is well known. But you have to admit a few things about the place. It is economically vibrant beyond all reckoning. Houston and Dallas are exploding economically while the rest of the country dawdles.

Gail: Texas is the last gasp of the Sunbelt boom. It has all the advantages of warm weather, plus an enormous amount of space which makes housing stupendously cheap. It could have done just as well without being politically crazy.

But we were talking about Ebola.

David: As for Ebola and the election, my pretentious theory is that Ebola is the objective correlative of the campaign.

Gail: You’re using big words again.

David: If I remember high school English correctly, an “objective correlative” is an object that gives explicit access to the meaning of vague and insubstantial things, like a mood or an emotion. It’s an object that correlates to a mood or emotion or idea. T.S. Eliot made it famous writing about Hamlet.

Anyway, the country was already afraid. It felt like the people running things were not quite up to the job. Along comes a disease to perfectly embody that vague sense. That said, I don’t think Ebola is swinging too many votes. People are just sour and they are disappointed with the president.

Gail: It certainly has been a tough season for President Obama. But before we start blaming him for anything bad that happens next Tuesday, I would like to give him a shout-out for that hug-the-Ebola-nurse photo. Which allows us to recall that when AIDS hit the United States in 1981, President Ronald Reagan was criminally useless. Never said a word. As Laura Helmuth noted in Slate this week, Reagan’s press secretary made fun of the idea that the president would ever consider speaking out.

David: I totally agree with you on that one. It’s not in the president’s job description to be the professional emoter and behavior model, but when he can display some truth by example, he might as well do it.

Gail: I know I’m preparing my defenses in advance of next week. But I think the American people have been saying they want an effective government, not a smaller government. All the candidates are promising they’re going to end gridlock, but if there’s anything we’ve learned since Obama was elected, it’s that you don’t end gridlock by sending more Tea Party types to Washington.

David: I guess I think it is more generalized than that. They just don’t trust government to get the job done. At least the federal government. I’m struck by how amazingly stable polling has been on the Affordable Care Act. Democrats in swing states don’t try to defend it. They just promise to fix it. The relatively good news on the health care front over the past year has done nothing to change minds.

Gail: I find it sort of fascinating that the Republican Senate nominee in Iowa, who previously said she’d support a law to have federal officials arrested for attempting to implement Obamacare, is marketing herself as the “Iowa nice” candidate who can work across the aisle.

David: I find it shocking that Iowans should steal Minnesota’s slogan. Minnesota is the nice state. Missouri is the skeptical state. New Jersey is the brash state. Iowa should be the quiet state.

In her defense I think it is possible to arrest federal officials nicely. We call it compassionate conservatism.

Gail: O.K., this is the point at which we’re morally obliged to start making predictions. What’s yours?

David: I say this with no great confidence, but I’m guessing the Republicans pick up eight seats. I think the biggest surprise will be a G.O.P. win in Georgia.

Gail: That would make me sad, if only because Michelle Nunn has run such a good race and her opponent has been so terrible. It just seems unjust.

My guess is that we’re not going to know who gets control of the Senate for a while. Some state is going to be so close there’ll be a recount. And Alaska takes forever to just get the ballots together. Plus Georgia and Louisiana, which will probably go to runoffs, since they require their senators to get a majority of the vote.

David: Great! Why shouldn’t the decade’s most content-less campaign go into overtime? I’m sort of amazed that this election hasn’t been about jobs and the economy. It hasn’t been about anything but a sort of fatalism.

Gail: There’s something about the idea of the fate of the nation hanging on Louisiana that makes me very nervous. I still remember being down there in 1991, covering the gubernatorial runoff between the Ku Klux Klan wizard David Duke and the deeply corrupt ex-governor Edwin Edwards. The Edwards supporters had those bumper stickers saying: “Vote for the Crook.” Which, blessedly, the people did.

David: I’ll take an effective crook over an ineffective honest person any day.

Gail: I should mention that at age 87, Edwards is running for the House of Representatives this year. After getting out of jail, marrying a woman 51 years younger, and starring in a reality TV series. You can’t say Louisiana isn’t interesting. And if there’s a runoff at least then we’d be able to spend part of the winter in New Orleans. So much better than next year, when we’ll be spending it in Des Moines.

David: I was just in New Orleans last week. I love every street in that city except Bourbon Street, which is filled with terrible pizza places, extremely drunk idiots and teenagers mortified to be walking with their parents.

Gong there makes me want to reread my favorite political novel of all time, Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men.” Trollope’s “Phineas Finn” is second.

And don’t knock Des Moines. Silence is golden.

Gail: What’s the state you’re following most closely? I have to admit Kansas is pretty darned fascinating. If the Republicans have to ferry in any more old party stalwarts to shore up Senator Pat Roberts, they’ll be resurrecting Alf Landon.

I got a twinge watching Bob Dole campaign so vigorously for Roberts. Do you remember in 2012 when Dole was sitting in the Senate, in his wheelchair, watching his friends refuse to ratify the United Nations treaty on people with disabilities? Which was based, of course, on the signature bill Dole got passed in 1990 when he was in the Senate.

David: Somebody should please explain to me why senators don’t ever want to retire. What’s fun about attending Ag Committee hearings when you are 84? Maybe the napping opportunities.

Gail: I talked with Dole after the treaty vote, and he kept coming back to the fact that both of the Republican Senators from Kansas had voted against ratification. But there’s Roberts now, in a deep ditch because he took his constituents so much for granted he didn’t even bother to pretend he lived in their state. Dole clearly has a much deeper sense of loyalty.

David: I once went to the Dole center in Kansas. They’ve got a sort of museum display about his life. The thing that moved me most was the exercise equipment he used to build himself back into shape after his war injury. He had wasted away to nothing and had to build himself all the way back. Then I got to see the basement where they keep all the presents he had been given by foreign dignitaries during his Senate years. There were carpets, saddles, baseball bats. People give politicians portraits of themselves. I guess that’s called knowing your subject.

Gail: It’s interesting how many elections there are this year where voters seem to despise both candidates. If Floridians were any more alienated by their governor’s race, they’d have been bringing alligators to the debates.

David: I don’t think Floridians should be angry or alienated. It doesn’t suit them. Among other things, it doesn’t go with their pastels.

Gail: I don’t want anybody to imagine that I’m making fun of other states because of my deep satisfaction with New York. Nothing is more humbling than spending a season covering New York politics. Where the phrase “not yet indicted” is regarded as a compliment.

David: If Minnesota is nice and Iowa is quiet, what should New York be: Pompous? Narcissistic? I say this lovingly. It is my state too.

Gail: Last question. Is there anything about this election that’s really surprised you? I didn’t expect to see so much of Mitt Romney on the campaign trail. Do you think he’s actually interested in running again? They say third time’s a charm.

David: Trust me. He isn’t running. I think his wife sort of ruled that out. That documentary released after the election revealed him to be an authentically warm and nice guy. If there are three things that don’t seem to work in politics these days it’s authenticity, niceness and warmth. Doesn’t fit the national mood.

 SEARCHCOUCH

A Conversation on the Edge of Human PerceptionBy CHRISTOPHER BOLLAS

 OCTOBER 17, 2015 2:30 PM October 17, 2015 2:30 pm 14 Comments

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CreditDadu Shin

Couch is a series about psychotherapy.

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Lucy wrote to me at my farmstead in North Dakota and asked if I was prepared to psychoanalyze her. She lived on a remote island in a Norwegian fjord. A 55-year-old writer, she was supported by a family trust. Her parents were deceased, she had no siblings and she rarely spoke to the 60 or so islanders who were her neighbors.

Her companionship came from a highly active mind devoted to endless reworkings of memories and sudden epiphanies. When she went down memory lane she inevitably retrieved a distressing encounter with another person — a teacher who had not understood her, an editor or publisher who had slighted her. Her epiphanies would be abrupt brainstorms in which she saw configurations in the landscape that momentarily objectified an unknown secret about herself: A wave crashing against a cliff, for example, took the shape of her mother leaning over her crib, trying to suffocate her.

Lucy phoned me at 8 o’clock in the evening, five days a week, always on the dot. She would speak nonstop. Usually she announced an agenda. “Today,” she would say, “I am going to tell you about Sister Underwood and the day she told me that I had to write ‘I cleanse my mind of evil thoughts’ 100 times on parchment in a very cold room when I was 13.”

At university Lucy had concentrated on Celtic and Nordic legends, and her imaginings were often pervaded by a conviction that she had actually seen one or another of the gods or humans who figured in these tales. I knew some of these figures from my university studies, and whenever I let on that I knew who one of them was, she would cry out, “Oh, Christopher, thank god you know him!” as if I had confirmed that this figure did exist in some form of reality.

She hallucinated many of these characters — and she would also transform real people through “memory” into phantasmagoric presences. Often she would be fleeing from them.

Lucy was a schizophrenic. Most people I know who have talked with schizophrenics have noticed that it feels like a conversation not with someone whose ailment is derived from the fog of symptomatic preoccupation, or the dulling repetition of character patterns, but with a person who seems to be existing on the edge of human perception. Take LSD and you see things you would ordinarily never perceive. Become schizophrenic and you see these things without the aid of drugs.

I have been working with schizophrenics since the 1960s. I am sometimes asked about the possible causes of schizophrenia. I do not know the answer to this. To me it is rather like asking what causes the being of human being. Nonetheless a certain theme has emerged in my work: To be a child is to endure a prolonged situation in which the human mind is more complex than the self can ordinarily bear. Our minds — in themselves — produce contents that will be overwhelming. To be successfully normal, then, we rather have to dumb ourselves down.

Work with schizophrenics has taught me that when defenses against the complexities of the mind break down there can be a breakthrough of too much. Selves cave in.

It is not a coincidence that the beginning of schizophrenia is almost inevitably an event in adolescence. The schizophrenic fails to make the transition from childhood to adulthood: Something goes wrong.

But precisely because selves falter during this period, they can also turn around and rediscover an ordinary track to life. So although schizophrenics are highly vulnerable to all kinds of disturbances, this porosity also makes them open to therapeutic change.

One day, during a session, Lucy screamed into the phone in an indescribably haunting way. I thought the house had caught fire or something else terrible had happened. I could hear her running around, screaming: “Go away! I did not do it! Please leave me alone!”

Half an hour passed, and she returned to the phone. She told me that “It” had come after her. This was a reference to a dragon that had eight legs and five eyes, and was flying around her house. It had come to kill her.

I suddenly realized that earlier in the session I had told her it was good that of late her bad memories were not “dragging on,” and I said that I thought my use of this phrase might have brought an image of the dragon into her mind. She insisted the dragon was real, and she was furious that I did not believe her.

“Christopher,” she said, “it was right here in front of me. It was breathing fire at me. It scorched my dress! It has nothing to do with what you said.”

Her scream was still echoing in my head and her refusals were adamant and infuriated, so I said little, and the session ended.

The next day Lucy accused me of having summoned the dragon: “You said, ‘Your dragon will get you.’ And it did!”

“That’s what you heard?”

“No,” she replied. “That is what you said. I have a perfect memory. You did this to me.”

“Clearly, I am to blame for a most horrifying event.”

“Yes,” she said, “so why did you do this?”

“I think you are angry with me for listening to some of your very private thoughts and you are trying to get rid of me.”

“You were horrible,” she said.

“I was, and perhaps am, the dragon who drags on about things.”

“You admit that,” she said, “do you?”

“Yes. It’s my job to do that, sort of.”

“To be a dragon?” she asked.

“No, but I do go on. Psychoanalysts are tedious at times.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Lucy, you pay me to analyze you. It’s my job and sometimes I don’t get things right.”

“Why don’t you get things right?” she asked.

“Well, Lucy, I …”

“Christopher,” she said, “I like it when you tell me what you think.”

“Thanks, Lucy.”

This is only a compressed fragment of a session. It is, however, typical of what went on between us for years. Lucy would construct a universe of heinous motivations and ascribe them to me. I would try to find the underlying persecutory anxiety that authored such admonitions, and now and then we were successful in tracking down the origins of her florid hallucinations to a simple idea.

For example, I was right to link the phrase “dragging on” to “dragon.” She heard the word “drag,” made a link to the idea that I thought she was a drag, and as she became incensed about this she felt that fire was coming out of her mouth and she saw a dragon. At the same time, I had to admit that I had been dragging on about her internal world and she was probably right to protest about this.

YOU need not be a mental health professional to be aware ofconcerted efforts within some factions in psychiatry — closely affiliated with the pharmaceutical industry — to promote the viewthat schizophrenia is genetically determined and should be treatedprimarily through a combination of maintenance medication and occasional periods of hospitalization. There may be a brief nod to“psychotherapy” in the form of time-limited cognitive behavioral treatment.

Sadly, many of today’s schizophrenics receive powerful antipsychotic medications in hospitals and are discharged on a cocktail of drugs that dulls their lives. Their zombielike states are caused not so much by their mental alterity as by their treatment. The tragic irony of this approach is that the patient is met with a process parallel to schizophrenia itself: radical incarceration, mind-altering actions, dehumanization, isolation.

Many people with schizophrenia may need to be in a hospital or to take some form of medication in order to help rediscover the useful parts of their minds. However, I am also aware of successful work with schizophrenics in which no medication has been administered and the patient has never been in the hospital. I am by no means the only psychoanalyst who has done such work.

We all know the wisdom of talking. In trouble, we turn to another person. Being listened to inevitably generates new perspective, and the help we get lies not only in what is said but also in that human connection of talking that promotes unconscious thinking.

Talking to an empathic other is curative. We all know that. We all do it. We do not need “outcome studies” to prove to us that it works. And yet it is precisely this ancient means of helping the self through its roughest mental and existential quandaries that is too often denied to the schizophrenic person.

By the end of the fifth year of our work, Lucy was no longer hallucinating and she was no longer dwelling in past memories, but she was haunted by her history of disturbance and wondered what it was about.

She began to read up on schizophrenia, and I found it intriguing and moving that she wanted to talk about her ailment. She said she now found it comforting to be able to describe it, even if now and then — every six months or so — she would descend back into it, recalling hallucinations, as if playing with the notion of conjuring them up. In fact, she was getting much better, and these forays into the past were like curious amusements.

In the final months of our collaboration, during a difficult spell in our work, she asked if I would just, please, tell her what I saw through my window in North Dakota. And so I would tell her about the owl, the rabbits, the deer, the eagles, the trees, the changing weather and so on. In turn she sent me photos of her cottage, her garden and chicken coop, and the small village where she lived.

It is interesting that our respective landscapes — her island, North Dakota — were like comforting third objects that nourished both of us as we struggled to help her find her mind. In the last phase of our work, she asked for actual photographs rather than merely my narrative of what I saw, and I obliged. The object world had become its own thing, not subject to anyone’s narration or subjective judgment. My North Dakota became her North Dakota.

Details have been altered to protect patient privacy.

Christopher Bollas, a psychoanalyst, is the author of the forthcoming book “When the Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia,” from which this essay is adapted.

The Opinion Pages | LETTER

Less Polarized ElectionsOCT. 16, 2015Advertisement

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To the Editor:

As David Brooks notes (“Clinton’s Opportunist Solution!,” column, Oct. 9), candidates swing to extremes to woo party bases for primaries and caucuses, then shift to the center for general elections.

Center-left to center-right moderate majority voters dismayed by the tenor of public discourse during the primary season need to wake up and regularly get to the polls or caucuses for both presidential and congressional elections. This may entail registering for a party in states where that is required for primary and caucus participation.

If more general-election voters participated in primaries and caucuses, the aspirations and candidacies of moderates would be strengthened, leading in time to a less polarized, more effective government.

Perhaps in this age of social media, this message could be quickly and broadly disseminated in advance of coming primaries. Politics will never be perfect, but I have to believe that we can do better.

ERIC D. TUCKER

Cross River, N.Y.

The Opinion Pages | LETTER

U.S. Chamber’s CapitalismOCT. 16, 2015Advertisement

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To the Editor:

Re “Big Tobacco’s Powerful Friend in Washington” (front page, Oct. 10):

Many thanks for your thorough and hard-hitting investigation of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its advocacy for Big Tobacco, led by the chamber’s chief executive, Thomas J. Donahue. You call this “American style” capitalism. In fact, it is simply capitalism in its most brutal form.

Consider not only Big Tobacco but also the fossil fuel industry: In a country bereft of effective and wise government leadership attentive to citizens’ needs, this unchecked economic system is wrecking our country and destroying the planet.

ELLEN CANTAROW

Medford, Mass.

SundayReview | EDITORIAL

Ending the Cycle of Racial IsolationBy THE EDITORIAL BOARDOCT. 17, 2015Photo

CreditLeigh Guldig

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Racial discrimination in housing remains pervasive and well entrenched, and governments at all levels bear a heavy share of the blame. Despite paying lip service to the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which required states and localities that receive federal money to try to overcome historical patterns of racial isolation, elected officials have often reinforced segregation through a range of policies. Among the most pernicious of these is the practice of buildingsubsidized housing mainly in existing ghettos instead of in areas that offer low- and moderate-income families access to safe neighborhoods, good jobs and schools that allow their children to thrive.

Good things can happen when the cycle of racial isolation is broken. An encouraging example can be found in the southern New Jersey suburb of Mount Laurel, where zoning policies that once excluded black and lower-income families were the target of a major lawsuit nearly a half century ago. In rulings handed down in 1975 and 1983, the New Jersey Supreme Court told Mount Laurel and other suburbs that they could no longer exclude affordable housing and were required to rewrite zoning laws to make such housing possible.

The Mount Laurel remedy had a difficult birth and still draws fire today. Some local officials are working diligently to turn back the clock to a time when poor and minority citizens had no choice but to live walled off in ghettos that stunted their lives and the lives of their children. Gov. Chris Christie and his allies in some of the state’s wealthy towns would like nothing more than to kill this remedy.

But much good has flowed from the court’s decisions. Once-segregated areas are now more diverse. And more than 60,000 homes have been built for low- and moderate-income families in the New Jersey suburbs, giving such families access to solid jobs and starter homes.

Critics would do well to study Mount Laurel itself, where an affordable housing development that opened in 2000 has yielded benefits that have been chronicled in a study led by the Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey. The study, recounted in the book “Climbing Mount Laurel,” shows that an attractive, well-maintained affordable housing development in an affluent neighborhood can improve the lives of struggling families without jeopardizing local property values, precipitating more crime or becoming an economic burden on the community.

Mount Laurel’s history is instructive. In the mid-20th century, African-Americans were hemmed in by pervasive bias and federally sponsored mortgage discrimination that kept them from buying homes and amassing personal wealth. In Mount Laurel, black families who had lived in the area for generations found themselves priced out as the township moved from a sleepy farmland community to a desirable suburb of nearby Philadelphia. With few housing options — and wanting to avoid the ghettos of Camden or Philadelphia — they moved to dilapidated farmhouses, summer cottages or converted chicken coops. As the area went even more upscale, officials began to condemn and raze these structures.

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In 1968, a newly formed community group optioned a plot of land and began laying plans to build 36 two- and three-bedroom apartments that would be affordable to low-income renters. The township’s mayor subsequently told black residents: “If you people can’t afford to live in our town,

then you’ll just have to leave.” The black residents filed suit, alleging that Mount Laurel Township had used exclusionary zoning to systematically shut people out on the basis of race and class. It further asserted that the township had an affirmative responsibility to allow for housing for people of all races and incomes.

The black plaintiffs were not alone. Real estate developers and the United Auto Workers union also brought suit against suburbs that excluded lower-income people through zoning laws while opening their arms to manufacturers and building housing for a growing middle-class.

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RECENT COMMENTSJack 29 minutes ago

The richest White communities in America usually vote Democrat. (Eight of the ten wealthiest counties voted for Obama in the last election)....

Heather 29 minutes ago

Northerners and liberals think they invented racial integration. Hate to tell you, but the blacks and white have been living and working...

Matt 29 minutes ago

The Times Editorial Board, most of whom don't live anywhere near subsidized housing, preaching again. Chances are most live in Co-ops that...

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WRITE A COMMENTThe court sought to put an end to all this in the Mount Laurel case. It ruled that the township was practicing an illegal form of discrimination that violated the State Constitution, and ordered municipalities throughout the state to end exclusionary zoning and create land-use policies that made a range of housing choices “realistically” possible.

Many Mount Laurel residents who had violently opposed “affordable housing” equated it with the crime-infested, public housing ghettos common in urban centers all over the country. The Mount Laurel development is anything but. Beautifully landscaped, the subdivision — known as the Ethel Lawrence Homes — is in some ways more attractive than nearby developments for middle- and upper-income families. Its management has rigorously screened applicants and has tried to ensure an income mix by setting broader income guidelines. The subsidivision managers have also focused on helping children who live in the development.

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Meanwhile, according to “Climbing Mount Laurel,” crime did not rise, nearby property values did not drop and taxes did not go up. The development has blended in so smoothly and quietly that a decade after it opened, three-quarters of the people in nearby subdivisions could not name it, and nearly one-third were unaware that such a subdivision even existed in the area.

The families that came to Mount Laurel from poorer places clearly benefited. Compared with families who applied for housing at the development but ended up elsewhere, the Ethel Lawrence families have shown higher rates of employment and family income, and lower rates of welfare

dependency. The parents are more closely engaged in the school lives of their children, who did well academically even though they found themselves in more challenging schools.

Whatever the precise reason for its success, the authors say, the Ethel Lawrence Homes subdivision validates the idea of developing affordable housing, “both as a social policy for promoting racial and class integration in metropolitan America” and as a practical strategy for alleviating poverty and achieving economic mobility.