by Deborah Blum
In a sense, what the vertical chamber showed, instead, was how naturally we become dependent on the society of others. We live by our intake of oxygen, food, water, and companionship. The monkeys who went into the pit had grown up accustomed to company. “The chamber involved breaking a period of socialization,” Suomi explains. Most of the chambered monkeys were at least three months old. They were kept in the vertical chamber for maybe a month, no more than six weeks. The whole point was to take animals who had an established bond—and then break it.
In total, less than a dozen monkeys went into the pit. Two of the animals came from Peggy’s nuclear family project. They fared no better than any of the others. When they returned to the lively, friendly hubbub of the family neighborhood, they seemed unable to reconnect. They were withdrawn, slow to respond to others. “Before separation, they had been among the most socially active and dominant of the nuclear family offspring,” Harry wrote. Now they were quiet little loners. The monkeys looked—at last—like an undeniable animal model of depression. They looked like animals lost in that hell of loneliness Harry had been working so hard to re-create.
“His work on depression was like a personal metaphor,” says Charles Snowdon, then a fairly junior member of the faculty and now head of the Wisconsin psychology department. “He was very depressed in the days of Margaret’s cancer. I was brought on as an examiner with Steve Suomi’s dissertation and they were using the vertical chambers.” Snowdon was appalled by the design of the chambers. “I asked Steve why, why were they using these? And Harry spoke up. He said, ‘Because that’s how it feels when you’re depressed.’”
Once they had a model of depression, of course, the charge was to repair the damage. The primate researchers began working with a university psychiatrist, William McKinney. “I basically started my research career in Harry’s lab,” says McKinney, now director of Northwestern University’s Asher Center for Study and Treatment of Depressive Disorders. With McKinney’s help, they began probing for the biochemistry behind the disorder.
In one early test, McKinney dosed the monkeys with reserpine, a compound that suppresses serotonin in the brain. Today, of course, we know that one way to treat depression is to boost serotonin levels, keep them elevated in the brain, and some of the best-known modern antidepressants and antianxiety drugs—Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil—employ that approach. But first, researchers had to figure out that serotonin had an influence on depression. The tests at Wisconsin belonged to the discovery period. Monkeys taking reserpine suddenly began to huddle, and their heads drooped as the serotonin levels fell. They were a living demonstration of the neurotransmitter’s potency. Who wouldn’t watch them and wonder how directly the brain chemistry of serotonin affected mood and whether it could be manipulated?
That’s not to say that the scientists in the Wisconsin primate lab made the Prozac connection. They were still trying to figure out whether they even had the right chemistry and what it meant. Harry and his colleagues continued treating depression in monkeys with then-current approaches, testing medications. The researchers found that the existing therapies had definite limits, couldn’t break fully through that shell of apathetic misery. The monkeys were, maybe, a little more active, but still withdrawn. They still seemed separate from companions and family. The lab could induce depression, all right, but its scientists seemed a long way from repairing their destructive handiwork.
They were beginning to wonder, though, whether there might be a kind of social feedback loop to depression. You could induce it by ruthlessly removing social contact. Could you then alleviate it also by social means? Perhaps the antidote to taking love away was simply giving it back. One of the most guiding principles in Harry’s laboratory was that there was no justification for damaging an animal unless part of the test was to learn how to fix the problem. If one relationship damaged you, could others repair the injury? The Wisconsin laboratory had been working to answer that question for years, ever since cloth mom had proved to be so dismal at raising her charges, ever since Bowlby had pointed out to Harry that loneliness can be next to craziness.
It was Harry’s graduate student, Leonard Rosenblum, who devised one of the more compelling tests of the healing powers of friendship. He hauled cloth mom back into the surrogate business and had her raise another four little monkeys. But Rosenblum allowed his infants into a larger circle. Although their home was with cloth mom, for thirty minutes a day, five days a week, they had a play date. His little monkeys rapidly became friends; they were thrilled to see each other. When they grew up, they looked nothing like the earlier offspring of cloth mom. They were socially adept, even what you might call normal—outgoing, socially skilled, and group-savvy. Rosenblum compared those surrogate-raised monkeys with youngsters brought up by living mothers. The second group also had playdate time. “What was surprising to everyone was that there wasn’t much difference between the two groups,” Suomi says. “Every monkey raised by surrogate sucked its thumb. But they could play and get along. When you added in the time with playmates, they became relatively normal monkeys. They had normal patterns of play, they were pretty good parents, they were functional.” Other studies showed that if you extended the playtime, you increased the positive effects. If developing monkeys had some chance at normal relationships, they could overcome some of the deficits of life with cloth mom. The healing effects of friendship only emphasized, by contrast, the desperate position of the isolated monkeys.
“The isolates were horribly deficient,” Suomi says. “And it was very hard to reverse that.” Their next idea occurred at the end of lunch one day, he recalls, yet another session when Harry and his grad students were drinking coffee and tossing out ideas. The isolate monkeys needed a lot of contact to make the turn back to normal. It needed to be gentle contact, steady, soft, friendly. The isolates’ normal peers tended to attack these oddball monkeys and then ignore them. But what about really little monkeys, who were almost compulsive clingers, who would adoringly cuddle even with bug-faced cloth mother? Maybe they just hadn’t tried the right monkeys. So they matched the isolates with three-month-old youngsters, the most determined cuddlers on the face of the earth. These were the same age as those little monkeys who tried to woo brass-spike mom, who peered lovingly through the Butler box window at their cloth mother. Suomi thought there was another advantage to these baby “peer therapists.” They were just starting to become interested in play; they might be able to engage the isolated monkeys in that as well.
To start, the scientists put the baby therapists and the isolated monkeys together for two hours a day. It was almost like watching a peculiar game of tag. The little animals would approach, the older isolates would back nervously away. Again and again, until the unnerved isolates huddled into a corner, heads down, rocking. And then the little therapists would cuddle against them, clinging and stroking. They would repeat this dance until the isolates began to lose their sense of being threatened and became interested instead. Until, slowly, they began responding, just plain old monkey to monkey.
It was Suomi who worked out most of this program for the six-month isolates. With “therapy,” the majority could be coaxed back to a functional life. “The only individuals to suffer prolonged distress from these experimental efforts were the experimenters,” Harry wrote, in a rare, tacit acknowledgment of how hard it could be to watch a monkey struggle toward a normal social life. But the longer the monkeys were isolated, the harder it was to bring them back. One of the bitterest—and most important—lessons of the isolation experiments is that social skills rust when not used. “Six months of isolation was right on the critical edge of recovery,” Suomi says. If the researchers went to a year of isolation, the animals seemed almost warped beyond repair, twisted into creatures that were no longer really rhesus macaques. One baby animal fainted the first time a scientist held him—the sense of warm, living touch was so alien and so terrifying.
Harry thought they might just have to write off the long-term isolat
es. He didn’t like it though. He’d never written off a living monkey; he’d spent his career hoarding them. Finally, one of his newest grad students, Melinda Novak, made a proposal. Novak had also joined the Wisconsin group in the late 1960s, the time Harry’s depression was deepening. After graduation, she went on to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where she eventually became head of the psychology department. Harry always called her one of his smartest students; so bright, he once said, that she brought tears to his eyes. He was more than willing to listen to her idea. He was more than willing to be wrong if the strange, lost isolates could be saved.
Novak’s scheme, moving inch by cautious inch, was a glacial-speed approach to the peer therapy program. She thought the extreme isolates couldn’t handle even a couple of hours with a baby monkey. So the long-term isolates were permitted just to see other monkeys, watch them through the bars of their cage. First they watched other isolates, comfortably similar even in their self-clasping and rocking. Then they watched the therapists, who peered back interestedly from an adjacent cage. Then each was given a few minutes a day with a friendly little monkey, then a few minutes more until they were caged full time with a younger, socially competent therapist. It took months, sometimes half a year, before the therapist might coax normal responses from her companion. But under this feather-light program, the young macaques tentatively began to accept other animals.
And eventually, surrounded by friends and family, they began to act like normal animals. You couldn’t pick them out of a monkey crowd unless they were suddenly stressed, or briefly placed back in a solo cage, where the shadows of loneliness hovered again. Then temporarily, they would fall back into their old self-rocking habit.
“Melinda’s study was remarkable because we believed that one-year isolates were beyond redemption,” Jim Sackett says. “The fact that they also responded well to young infant therapists was really a major finding for theories about impoverished rearing.”
He and Novak, and Harry, too, thought that some of the techniques developed in the lab, such as peer therapy, might be helpful to people trying to help severely neglected and depressed children. Novak puts it this way: “We learned a lot from those animals—that certain kinds of behaviors could be rehabilitated, that some animals do better than others. Given that kids are reared in so many different ways, so many in a deprived situation, you need to ask those kinds of questions—how robust is the developing system? Is it buffered from certain kinds of experience?”
The monkeys dropped into the vertical chamber were different. They knew how to function socially before they were locked away. It wasn’t that they had to be taught how to interact with other monkeys again. They had to want to do that. They had come back from despair and depression and rediscovered the ability—or the desire—to belong. For some of the monkeys it was harder to overcome depression than to acquire social skills. For others, it took only a few days back into the world of companionship to regain balance.
And although it would take them years to follow through the lessons of the isolation studies—from the brief separations to the full year to the depths of the pit—they began to appreciate one of those lovely, common sense results: Everyone is different. When we discuss trauma or grief or isolation, we need to remember that we cope as individuals according to who we are, and that includes our internal strengths and our external safety net. “Perhaps the most important lesson was that not everyone was terribly affected by these experiments,” Suomi says. “It took us a while to see it, but quite frankly the vertical chamber experiments led us to recognize that individual variation matters, that it’s not just background noise.” Novak also finished the isolate therapy with a strong respect for the individual. “The work let us see how flexible the system might be. We know now—better than we did then—that some animals and some people are going to handle these stresses better.”
Novak remembers Harry himself, caught in his own depression and moving more and more slowly, like a man in the last stages of exhaustion. “It [the depression] was definitely there and he was tired with it. But even in the cloud of depression, he was quick-witted and he was sharp. You might think he wasn’t paying attention. He’d be resting, his head on his desk, and then suddenly he’d raise his head and he’d make the critical point.”
Still, there were also days when he simply put his head on the desk and gave in to the same kind of paralysis that numbed his pitraised monkeys. There were days when the depression was a physical weight that rested on his chest, and it took every bit of his energy just to move it off and sit up. His first graduate student, Abe Maslow, died unexpectedly of a heart attack in June 1970; it wasn’t until October of that year, five months later, that Harry finally sent his condolences. “I was saddened to hear of the sudden, untimely death of Abe, just at the time that he had reached the peak of his scholastic career,” he wrote to Maslow’s widow, Bertha. “I regret my long delay in replying to your letter but my wife, Peggy, has been seriously ill for almost a year, and I have had some problems.”
Peggy was definitely getting sicker. “Harry was really tied up,” Novak says. “She was the iron horse.” Everyone saw Harry as the more vulnerable of the two. Students pitched in to drive him back and forth from the lab, cook his meals, watch and worry about how much he was drinking. Bob Zimmermann was shocked when he met Harry at research conferences in the late 1960s. “I don’t think he was ever completely sober around then.” For the first time, Helen LeRoy saw the drinking taking a visible toll. She recalls watching as Harry got off an airplane and staggered just a little as he came down the ramp; she wondered then how to help him through this time. LeRoy, Jim Sackett, and Steve Suomi were all working together to keep the labs functioning smoothly. Harry was conserving his energy for his research and for just holding himself together. But Peggy never allowed herself to appear vulnerable the way Harry did. Everyone remembers her as unstoppable to the end. “She was a great model for handling death,” Melinda Novak says.
Peggy was uncomplaining, unapproachable. When she had to go to the hospital, she would sit in bed, IV lines hooked up, doggedly editing her manuscripts. When she was discharged, she was back fussing over the nuclear family apparatus. “Everyone talked about how brave she was. She was very ill, she was under chemotherapy, and she would still go up in this attic to check the monkeys, even when she was basically crawling to get there,” says Harry’s old friend, UC-Berkeley child psychologist Dottie Eichorn.
Peggy didn’t want, didn’t ask for sympathy—and, perhaps, she found it difficult to find it for others, even Harry’s long-time collaborators. In 1970, Jim Sackett was invited to write a chapter on the isolate-raised monkeys for an anthology. “So I went to Harry and I showed him the letter inviting me to do this. I said, ‘Really you should do this, this is mostly your work and I just have some things that I contributed, but at the very least, we should be co-authors.’ And he said, no, no, you go ahead and do it. I asked him three or four times but I never thought about getting it in writing. So I wrote the chapter. It was a pretty good review of isolate rearing and some surrogate stuff. And then it came out and Margaret Harlow formally charged me with plagiarism.”
Sackett was shocked; really, is still shocked. He hadn’t worked directly with Peggy and didn’t know her well. There were rumors that she resented the amount of attention that he’d been getting. But everyone knew that he’d been standing by Harry for years and, he hoped, everyone knew that he didn’t steal other people’s work. Others at the psychology department had been hinting that when Harry retired, Sackett might be lab director. To come in and find this notice of formal charges on his desk, well, it stopped his breath for a moment. “So I picked it up and I took it to Harry and I said, ‘You remember when we talked about this a number of times and you insisted that you were not going to be involved in this, even when I begged you to?’ And he mumbled something and just put his head down on the desk. And that, you know, was a Harry mannerism when he’d decided he’d had e
nough.”
Sackett was forced to go elsewhere for help. He took Peggy’s complaint to the head of the psychology department, Wulf Brogden, who dismissed it without question. But winning that round didn’t take away the sense of betrayal. It wasn’t Peggy’s actions that stung so much. It was Harry’s. “Harry didn’t back me up. He didn’t say yes and he didn’t say no.” At a time when Peggy was dying, Harry had clearly chosen his loyalties. He had no choice, he felt, but to stand by his wife. “It was obvious that was her business and he wasn’t going to touch it.” Sackett understood the choice. But even understanding the personal nature of it—and so many of Harry’s choices were personal—Sackett still couldn’t accept that it was the right choice. He started looking for another job and took the one in Seattle when it was offered.
“And, even then, Harry never said a word to me about what had happened. I lost a lot of respect for him over that and I’d had an enormous amount of respect. He was a brilliant, incredibly hardworking man. He had a lot of gifts. But I just couldn’t stay.”
Peggy was angry at the end. She was never going to finish her exploration of families and children and the way they care for each other. She wasn’t even going to see her nuclear family project through. Her daughter, Pamela Harlow, believes her mother had always thought that she would be able to make up lost time. Peggy hadn’t grudged the time with Pamela and Jonathan, but she had hoped to rebuild her career. And now that, too, was being taken away from her. “She sat all that time, with all that talent, in the margins of the university,” says Lorna Benjamin Smith. “Did she have unrealized potential? There’s an understatement. She was an amazing observer, smarter than smart. And she knew it, too—she was angry. It was all-out wrong what happened to her—and there’s no other side to that issue.”
