I was at dinner last night over at my father’s house, and a friend of his was also in attendance. This friend is a well-intentioned person, but he never shuts up, he talks out of his ass, and he never listens. He’s irritating as all get out, and I often feel badly about not being able to really engage much with him in conversation, but he’s just too much stimulation for my misfiring neurotransmitters.

I forgot how we got on the subject, but at some point during dinner, he started going on about how he was sure that most depression diagnoses these days were over-medicalized and over-medicated, and that most of it was stuff that people “just had to deal with” as part of one’s life experiences. That simple proposition? It’s possible. There are probably some people who don’t need antidepressants, and just need some cognitive/behavioral therapy to learn some coping skills or change their conduct. But I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt. Whatever works, really. If medication gets you through a hard spot? Go for it.

But of course, it didn’t stop there. He started going on about how all mental illnesses were so subjectively diagnosed, and that a lot of things could be just gotten over. He started talking about how he would just talk himself out of funks as a teen, or make a change of scenery– as if his experiences settled the question. My dad tried to push him off with a subtle “what the hell are you talking about?” but that didn’t work. He continued, acting as if his personal experiences were sufficient empirical evidence to solve the human condition. That, and the experiences of one or two people he’d known. At that point, he started questioning biochemical and hormonal imbalances, which got my brother, the pharmaceutical researcher, into the fray. My brother was trying to explain the science of the SSRI’s, the dopamine inhibitors, the MAOIs, the typical and atypical antipsychotics. I chimed in with facts about how the brain electricity is sufficiently different in bipolars and schizophrenics to be detectable on MRI. You can see it, I said.

Neither my brother’s objective expertise nor my own hard-won knowledge could cause this person to admit his lack of foundation, set aside his skepticism, or admit he needed to learn more before issuing blanket statements. I shut the argument down, finally, by saying “I don’t care what you say, lithium rocks.” Everyone else laughed, he finally realized he needed to shut up, and we moved the conversation to another topic.

As we were driving home, my husband asked me if I was upset by this man’s know-nothing bloviating. I told him I was and I wasn’t, in part because I knew he didn’t mean any personal harm, and in part because I was so used to this dolt’s utterances on any topic that I knew there was no use in really engaging with him about it, because he’d continue as he always did until something happened personally to him to change his mind. What I am more upset by is the general reductionist attitude that far too many live by—“if it’s never happened to me or anyone I know, then I don’t believe it.”

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

The problem with this attitude is not just the impact on the people around them who do have different experiences—although that’s bad enough, since it affects the way they vote, the way they educate their children, and the way they affect the general level of human happiness. Denying someone else’s experience just because it’s never happened to you is reckless cruelty of the highest order. The insistence on personal experience not only connotes a lack of imagination and empathy– it also connotes a lack of preparation.

When these blinders-on pragmatists are faced with something never dreamt of in their philosophy, they deny it, ignore it, misname it, suppress it, and otherwise completely fall apart. Having never experienced real depression, or mania, or delusion, there is shame, fear, anxiety—because their unwillingness to be curious about and open to other experiences than their own impairs their ability to deal with something new when it comes along. It draws the process out longer than it needs to be— all us believers end up having to take care of them in the meantime, and then listen to them preach to the choir when they do come around to their real condition.

There’s a Buddhist principle called “beginner’s mind.” Essentially, the idea is that you should always be open and accepting of new ideas, new possibilities—to close your mind, and consider yourself an expert, is to fail to be open to all the experiences life can show you—if you’re willing to look for them. I try to practice beginner’s mind, and it’s hard, because it means I have to re-think previous opinions, and even discard things I thought I believed. The temptation to be a never-believer is thus understandable—it’s much easier. But I’d rather be open, and uncomfortable, and evolving, than closed, negating, and nullifying.

What would you rather be? A blue sky, or a black hole?