The venerable Private Eye
has a general media corrections column which it applies to events such
as the death of Princess Diana, a la: “before her death we may have
given the impression that the saintly virtuous etc etc Diana was in
fact a ‘narcissistic parasite’. The error was made by a sub-editor ©
all newspapers.”

Never was such a mechanism more required than
in the Brogden affair. By a single act of “attempted suicide,” the
Brogden affair has been transformed from a story about an energetic
young leader who made one offensive remark and was subsequently
revealed to be a wannabe pantsman, into a deep soul-searching about the
stresses and strains of political life, and the humanity we owe to each
other. One moment it’s a political event and the next it’s a symptom of
cultural crisis, with all the usual collateral damage – Tony Abbott
being obtuse, Dr Frasier Kennett on the radio offering on-air advice.
How did this happen? Is it magic? Actually it seems to revolve around
the confused categories by which we think about personal life.

Here
is the central paradox of the Brogden affair – until last week he was,
and was known to be, a positive, motivated, successful, extroverted and
ambitious person. Scandal hits, deals a body blow to his career, and
two days later he self-harms. Suddenly his mood is redefined as one of
“depression,” he’s admitted for psychiatric treatment, and the media
frenzy is retrospectively defined not as vigorous/over-the-top, but as
“bullying,” and everyone starts to re-evaluate their conduct, society,
their cat. How did Brogden go so quickly from alpha male to depressive?

The
answer is that he didn’t. He made a suicide attempt (possibly more an
act of self-mutilation than a full attempt) under a welter of emotions
– shame, guilt, embarrassment, self-reproach, anger – and these were
then medicalised and defined as “depression.” The simple explanation –
he f*cked up, got drunk and briefly wanted to die – is abandoned in
favour of a whole blizzard of public discussion of the “depression
epidemic.” Consequently any sense of personal responsibility is
absolved, and it all becomes someone else’s fault.

If you
automatically define such an act and such a tangle of emotions as
“depressive,” then the corollary is that public life should be
conducted on the terms of the depressive – ie that every remark should
be scrutinised to see what its effect would be on the most vulnerable
human being. This is a recipe for a non-functioning society, since
robust public life would become impossible.

We have to assume
the opposite – public citizens are expected to be robust in order for
free argument and debate to be possible. What the Brogden affair
revealed was an easily accessed culture of victimhood – from the journo
who felt “harassed” when Brogden said “are you available” – to Brogden
himself who f*cked up twice, first in making the initial remark, second
in not sticking his chin out and living through it. There but for the
grace of God go all of us, but that doesn’t mean that the condition of
“depression” should become a catch-all way of putting the blame
elsewhere.