Strange Contagion

by Lee Daniel Kravetz

  “What does something like this say to you?”

  “It makes me think that the community really, really needs to feel something good,” he says. “After everything we’ve been through, what’s wrong with spreading a bit of happiness?”

  As the theater department runs through rehearsals, the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon cultivates the world’s happiest music playlist. It includes “If This World Were Mine” by Luther Vandross, “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours” by Stevie Wonder, “Kiss” by Prince, “We Are Young” by fun., “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” by James Baskett, “I Got You (I Feel Good)” by James Brown, and the prelude to Bach’s Suite No. 1 conducted by Pablo Casals. There are lots of official lists cataloging the happiest songs in the world, but this one launches an international campaign called #HappinessSoundsLike, and it becomes the soundtrack to the International Day of Happiness.

  Inspired by Ban Ki-moon, I decide to conduct my own straw poll among friends on Facebook for the music that makes them the happiest. Responses are all over the map. “Oblivious” by Aztec Camera; “Brown Eyed Girl” by Van Morrison; “Rapper’s Delight” by The Sugar Hill Gang; “Big Rock Candy Mountain” by Harry McClintock; Sam Cooke’s “Wonderful World”; and “anything by Queen.” Tastes span the spectrum and defy a single genre, yet each carries with it the exact same physiological effect in the spread of happiness.

  As for my contribution, inspired by Shelby, I add “I Get a Kick out of You” by Cole Porter, which made its debut in the musical Anything Goes. After the show’s original Broadway bow in 1934, the New York Times boasted, “Take it from me, the Depression is over!” The Depression wasn’t over, of course. The country was in for another seven years of economic turmoil. But here, within the environment of pure narrative and whimsy, for a while each night it must have looked to Broadway audiences as though something significant and terribly sad had ended.

  Musical theater is rooted in drama reduced to musical beats. Like the transformative medium of any artistic endeavor, it seamlessly blends reality and fantasy within the quickening thrum of musical cues, flashes of color, spinning bodies. If there’s something fictitious about the concept of musical theater, it’s the fabrication of sudden and instantaneous song and dance that requires that we suspend doubt. Music casts a spell that switches off our logical brain and lulls us in into the hypnosis of pure belief, an ointment that eases the discomfort.

  “Music stimulates primitive, evolutionarily ancient and deep brain structures,” writes the psychologist Ruth Herbert. It stokes emotion, reaches into the guts, and coordinates the body’s systems, the head, the pulse, the muscles, and the bones. Brain cells work together to decipher melody, rhythm, pitch, and lyrics. Music lights up the visual cortex, fires up the motor cortex, creates a contagious nodding of the head, stokes the reward centers of the brain, and exposes our mind’s eye to flashes of memory. It’s a cipher for emotions and emotional reactions. Tones activate endorphins, regulating mood, affecting every person within earshot on a nonconscious level. Moreover, it becomes an epoxy for moments and memories and community-forged camaraderie.

  Music is also perhaps the most effective vector for the spread of contagious emotion. “When you’re in a choir you literally ‘catch’ certain feelings from one another,” continues Herbert. Music cues physiological changes. Our bodies pick up the thrum of a thickly jubilant tempo cast in a bright major key that fills our chests with bravura. Music therapy has a common benefit above and beyond most types of treatments for depression. Hospitalized children are happier during music therapy, more so than in play therapy. Sad music reduces the internal beat of one’s heart, but it also boosts immunity, dampens stress, and decreases blood pressure.

  While there is no common taste in music, there is a common link between cultures, as though the archetype of music is less a form we fill with meaning and more a collectively acknowledged trope.

  Next to chocolate and true north, music is the closest thing to universal agreement we have.

  The plague of happiness is an elusive scourge to pin down in part because the way we generally define emotions is subjective. Some refer to happiness in terms of pleasant sensations, as optimism, or as pure indulgence. In biological terms, happiness is nothing more than signals from the brain’s limbic system, our emotional core. In The Republic, Plato wrote that happiness spreads among those who are moral, who harness their power responsibly, and who shoulder the burden of social justice. That is, happiness is earned, a quality that one aspires to and is contingent upon qualities of one’s personality. More contemporary views like those of the neurologist and psychiatrist Victor Frankl put forth that the spread of happiness requires a person to look inward and host a desire to be beholden to something greater than oneself. In all cases, susceptibility to happiness relies on contingencies.

  When I met with Nicholas Christakis, he spoke about his work with James Fowler at UC San Diego and their findings on the collective phenomenon of happiness, based on their twenty-year longitudinal study published in 2008. Emotions, they learned, move across social networks, and happiness is its own vivacious affliction. Happiness is more easily understood than any of the 6,000 spoken languages around the world. A happy next-door neighbor increases our chances of being happy ourselves by 34 percent. Every happy individual in one’s social network increases a person’s chances of catching happiness by 9 percent.

  Happiness by proximity is also a panacea for depression. The biggest difference between the contagions of depression and happiness is that this hovering and deep feeling of sadness comes with its own built-in mechanism that limits spread. Unlike happiness, depression tends to make people isolate themselves and disengage from social networks. If you’re not around others, you’re less likely to spread your temperament. The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health looked at 2,000 US high school students and determined that having five or more friends with a healthy and happy mood can halve the probability of developing depression and double the probability of recovering from depression over a six- to twelve-month period. Having depressed friends puts people at risk for catching clinical depression, while having happy friends is apparently “both protective and curative.”

  But what I find most fascinating is that happiness spreads by up to three degrees of separation. Like goals and greed, we can catch happiness from people without even realizing it and from sources we have yet to come face-to-face with. A happy Patient Zero has a 25 percent chance of passing happiness to the person next to her; she has a roughly 10 percent chance of passing happiness to her friend; and from there, her friend has nearly a 6 percent increased chance of passing happiness to another.

  At a quarter to seven on an evening in March 2015, Gunn High is a campus filled with shadows. The classroom windows are black. The sunken outdoor eating area colloquially known as the Bat Cave is abandoned. The empty grounds still contain traces of student life. Battle of the Bands posters stapled to walls. Notices from the student executive council taped to pin boards. Staff golf carts parked under an awning.

  Lights orange as brass ceiling tins illuminate the parking lot. It begins to fill with cars. Campus walkways grow loud with foot traffic. Guests gather outside the closed doors of Spangenberg Theatre. Inside, students work feverishly backstage. They slip into costumes and apply makeup to their faces. The orchestra tunes instruments. When the doors open, the theater quickly grows warm with bodies. People in every seat. Voices popping in this commodious pavilion.

  Walking in, there’s a sense that we are welcome strangers here, that the teenage occupiers who oversee this campus have invited us onto their turf, allowing us a glimpse at their lives behind these walls. We are here so that they can say to us: See us! Look at us! We are so much more than the stories you’ve heard about us. We are more than our academics. We have interests in break dancing, automotive technology, robotics, and art. Don’t pity us. Don’t call us purely depressed, angry, fearful, or panic-stricken. We are kind and w
arm and excitable. We have the ability to be resilient and the capacity for hopefulness. If we can smile and sing, then you can, too. We give you permission to be happy, and to be happy for us.

  Later, James Shelby will tell me that while he’s backstage, waiting for the show to start, he feels the significance of this moment deeply. As the house lights dim he realizes he isn’t breathing. It’s only as the overture begins that he slowly exhales.

  As the character of Reno Sweeney moves into the bright melody of “I Get a Kick out of You” and the stage swims in faux sequin dresses, chiffon skirts, tams, white sailor uniforms, and linen jumpers, I imagine what the audience around me is feeling in these moments. A sense of letting go. A sense of giving in. For a couple of hours Gunn High will be a gateway to something good and something healing. When we arrive at the song “There’s No Cure Like Travel/Bon Voyage,” our minds turn to the notion of cure and escape. Joy wells within my lungs. I forget I’m watching a high school performance. The silhouetted members of the audience in front and beside me are enraptured, caught up in this bright buoyancy, too. We are all synchronized to it. By the time we reach “You’re the Top,” our collective feeling has emulsified. It’s a good feeling. A perfect feeling.

  Shelby senses it, too, as the beats and rhythms connect the audience members to the show and to each other. He feels a warmth dispersing quickly and completely through the room, as it will with each performance this week, during which parents, students, administrators, and community members will come together to create a kind of celebration of life.

  At the entr’acte, the theater becomes a jumble of voices again. There are beaming faces. Rich conversations. Students huddling outside with their friends. People check their phones for messages that have come in during the show. It’s just the real world trying to edge back into their lives. We are saved at the last minute by act two. The ensemble pushes the theatrics of joy back in front of us. We take our medicine, and it goes down sweet and good, the way Miguel Sabido and Sean Southey administer their linctus to populations in Latin America, in India, in the Caribbean. These are targeted treatments for the masses. Tonight we’ll go home. The hope is that we’ll carry something of this back with us and that it will stay with us for a little while. Tomorrow we’ll feel a bit happier than usual. We may not even know why.

  Gunn High’s unique depression era is not over, and I don’t think anyone in the theater tonight is fooled into believing the respite is anything more than what the ticket promises: a pageant of music, ensemble glee, a bit of spectacle, and a drop of humor that the town so desperately needs. Shelby will feel it happen with every encore, a sense of gratitude and release. When the show wraps and the crew goes to strike the set, Shelby is left wondering if this feeling hovering tenderly in his chest might carry into the town and exist here, and at least for a while remain a resource to tap as easily as one might hum the bars of a song.

  Chapter 27

  Applying the Salve of Emotional Attunement

  We’re fighting a hurricane with umbrellas.

  James Shelby, pitting one social contagion against many others. Julie Lythcott-Haims, crusading to end a component of stress. These are small victories against a far more powerful enemy. There must be a way to merge these practices and present a concentrated front.

  So after Gunn High’s spring musical, I call Sigal Barsade at the Wharton School. I ask her if she has ever come across a better tool in her studies on companionate love that stops problematic social contagions from spreading. Is it a matter of overwhelming the system with examples of positive emotions, I ask, or is it about systematically putting up boundaries against the emotions that tear people apart?

  “It’s not about spreading companionate love, or being a moral leader,” she says. “When I teach about emotional contagions, one of the points I make is the value of being emotionally intelligent.”

  I frown. Emotional intelligence rests on the assumption that we know how to read our own emotions as well as recognize them in others. Not long after the strange contagion of 2009 began, I’d asked Roni Habib at Printers Cafe how he thought the students at the school were doing. Habib said they were frightened and depressed, but that the students were also guarded in how they expressed themselves. Sure, there were displays of grief and rallies of support, but over the course of our subsequent meetings and conversations throughout the years, Habib also pointed out that this stoicism he saw had revealed itself to be far more systemic. At some point he realized it wasn’t fortitude or resignation he was seeing in his students but a flat affect that revealed, in his estimation, a lack of the basic tools of knowledge about emotion. How are people supposed to express how they feel if they’re not particularly good at recognizing how they feel in the first place?

  “I’m working on a new technique,” Habib told me once in reference to something rather unorthodox he was attempting with his classes. For some time, in fact, Habib has suspected that a long-term fix requires not simply teaching people about the processes of emotional contagions but teaching students an entirely new language.

  The dialect of emotion.

  I text Habib later that night about visiting the campus again next week to see what he’s been up to.

  I’ve come to enjoy our time together, Habib with dark eyes that in happier times burn with affection. Over the past few years we’ve met in his classroom during his office hours or after school. We talk about his children, a son and a daughter who are the same ages as my own. I’ve met his wife, a psychotherapist who was actually fulfilling her training hours through a psychotherapy internship at Gunn High when the first cluster came together in 2009. Today we’re barreling toward the end of another school year, racing perilously fast toward finals, AP test week, and the period during which college admissions notify seniors of acceptances and rejections. It is what some here refer to as the start of suicide season. This time of year naturally makes Habib nervous.

  I arrive just as the school’s electric bell sounds. His classroom empties except for a couple of students who stay behind to take a makeup test. Habib gets them set up and then comes over, embracing me hard. When he lets go, he catches himself on the edge of a desk with two fingers. His knees buckle. He slowly lowers himself to the floor, crawls on all fours, and lies outstretched on his back, squeezing his eyes shut.

  He recently pulled a muscle in his back, he tells me. He’s not exactly sure how; it’s stress, he figures. And it takes all of his strength to stand on his feet throughout the day and lecture.

  Eight students gone. He taught many of them. Habib finds himself alone at the end of his days here, facing empty desks and the fact that we’re still no closer to experiencing closure. He likes his job, but a constant feeling of losing has wicked some of that joy away. Maybe this is why Habib’s invitations to visit him after school have grown more frequent lately. It’s difficult to be here alone.

  It is easy to imagine Habib as a student at Gunn High in the nineties, a young kid, tall and lean and with a little more hair on the top of his head. Back then he somehow managed to sidestep the cultural snare of competitiveness and full-throttle ambition the school’s culture exposed him to. And, in the end, maybe that kind of bit him in the ass. His friends got into top schools and edged closer to that dream of making it big in the tech industry. Instead, Habib went to UC Santa Cruz and later became a teacher.

  Between the third and fourth suicide by one of his students, Habib found himself returning to some of the coursework he’d taken in college on personal empowerment, the classes that focused on techniques to break negative patterns of thinking and behaving through a grounded awareness of our emotions. Habib had come away with a fundamental understanding that emotions are not a luxury but a necessity, as essential as any survival instinct. “Paying attention to how I feel is the compass I need to go through this maze that is life,” he tells me. Just beyond the windows of his classroom, 2,000 students cross between the buildings and through the causeways. They seem happy and engaged
with each other. Yet, beneath the surface, the high-achievement mind-set is still as much a part of Gunn High’s makeup as it was when Habib was a student here. Back then kids weren’t killing themselves in uncoordinated and seemingly random acts. But, looking back, he says there were warnings indicating trouble ahead. Habib points to a community-wide plague of mental illness—major depression and generalized anxiety among them—that has historically gone unacknowledged and unrecognized by students and faculty alike.

  Where emotion takes a backseat to ambition, social contagions reign with absolute impunity. The best you can do in such a scenario is to cultivate happiness and create a kind of counterbalance to the effects of negative emotions, although to Habib that seems rather shortsighted. You might convince the school to pipe upbeat music through the public-address system and manually infect people with joy, or ask teachers to increase their smile quotient in the classrooms. Even a bogus expression of delight triggers a dopamine effect in our minds, unsophisticated in their ability to tell a fake smile from a real one.

  But coming up with a tangible solution to this plague has been more complicated. To impose some kind of rule of law on the free-for-all of contagious emotions, Habib has decided that, rather than trying to teach students to wipe out problematic feelings, he’ll endeavor to pull every emotion forward.

  What Sigal Barsade says about emotional awareness is true, Habib comments, but it ignores one big problem. “Silicon Valley has never been good at being emotionally attuned.” One arm is latched around my neck as Habib braces himself with his other arm against a chair. He puts his weight against me and stands upright. “It’s part of our culture.”

  Similar to Gary Slutkin’s Cure Violence model, Habib recognizes that if students have a low threshold for depression and anxiety, the answer is to train everyone in the school to identify the warning signs and become interrupters to stop the cascade that leads from thoughts of self-harm to completing suicide. The problem is students have no idea what those signs are. Hindsight may be twenty-twenty, but if you don’t know what it is you’re looking at, you have no chance of finding what it is you’re looking for.