More Testosterone, from Ira Glass This Time

This week’s episode of This American Life was about testosterone. It had no direct relevance for anything psychiatry or anthropology, but it was fascinating, and tied in to the recent publications about the role of testosterone in the onset of depression. In a number of different stories, the program explored people who lost testosterone or who had started taking supplements to boost their levels, and discussed what happened – implicitly trying to get at the question of its link to gender, and ultimately of what it means to be a man or a woman. In a third story, all staff of the show decided to test their testosterone levels to see what personality traits it correlated with. The actual results were a small part of the story – much more central were the people's expectations, fears, and finally reactions. Where the first two stories had suggested that what makes us ‘act’ is more about biology than about ourselves, the emphasis this last story put on participants’ reactions to the correlation between hormone and traits returned to the more culturally constructed aspects of what makes a gender. Ultimately, of course, the test results did not match expectations whatsoever. This ultimately left the question about the real impact of testosterone unanswered. Having it does not make you a man, just as not having it does not make you effeminate.

Exploring the impact of hormones on our behaviors and drives brought up questions about the relationship between mind and body in a very acute way. Testosterone is a hormone that we often associate (I think) with unconscious sexual drives. Yet here, in these stories, its impact on personality became acutely visible. A man who temporarily stopped producing testosterone due to a medical issue saw the totality of his interests and ambitions vanish. A woman who took testosterone supplements in preparation for a sex change operation suddenly, miraculously, began to understand physics (this in itself is a fascinating question… what does this suggest about our fanatic attempts to defend women by arguing that what makes women less adept at the hard sciences is not an issue of innate ability but rather the impact of cultural expectations?). If these hormones have such a profound effect on our dreams, our thoughts, and our cognition, what does this say about the nature – and location – of our personality?

The general message about testosterone's effect seems to be that it fosters a sense of boldness. As Ira Glass said, it incites desire. Not just sexual lust, but desire overall. It makes you jealous, it makes you competitive, it makes you predatory, ambitious, and prone to take more risks. This ‘desire’ was the most acutely felt loss by the man who lost his testosterone. He described his state of being as a complete lack of interest and desire, and his outlook as “the most literal interpretation of the world ever.” He appreciated the world’s beauty in an unprecedented way, he told the listener, but with a complete and utter detachment from it. The ideal form of objectivity and neutrality, I thought. The kind anthropologists strove for until they decided around the 1960s that it didn’t exist.
… Maybe all it takes is a little less testosterone? Then again, who would want to be completely objective and detached? How could you make any decisions, or choices, if the world around you didn’t elicit some kind of emotional response? Wouldn’t it be an empty kind of life if nothing ever really touched you? Even the man without testosterone decided the life of detachment was no kind of existence…

In any case, these thoughts make me re-think the recent findings of the role of testosterone in depression. If lower testosterone really is involved in depression, its link to desire becomes really interesting. I immediately think about the woman who came into the outpatient psychiatric clinic this week, and who described her depression as a complete inability to make decisions. Or about Andrew Solomon, who included a similar sense of complete emotional lethargy in the phenomenology of his depression (The Noonday Demon, 2001). If depression involves a lack of desire, and desire is linked to testosterone, would hormone supplements be a useful form of therapy?
… But it’s probably not that easy… nothing involving mental illness ever is… and just think about the side effects…