The Cafe Cure (1990)

The Cafe Cure: or, Take Two Cappuccinos and Call Me in the Morning

David B. Schwartz

Coffee is a powerful drug. I am not talking here of its well-known ability to increase alertness, keep one from nodding on one’s desk in the afternoon, drive that extra hour at night. Rather I am speaking of its less-acknowledged but no less powerful stimulant qualities: the ability to stimulate conviviality, assuage feelings of isolation and loneliness, even perhaps arm one for the personal irritations of the workday. These effects are not captured in formulaic descriptions for the chemical caffeine: C8H10N4O2. For this, chemical analysis will not suffice. To get these effects, coffee must be taken in the company of others.

Each morning in Harrisburg, the daily ritual of people part of this “drug culture,” (as the anthropologists might put it) is repeated. Tables fill up at the Alva Restaurant across from the train station, at the State and the Colonnade on Second Street, and scores of other places “where everybody knows your name.” In recent years, this ritual has blossomed in the emergence of a phenomenon which residents of Seattle or Paris or Vienna could possibly do without: the neighborhood cafe. At places like Sweet Passions on Third Street or The North Street Cafe, coffee is drunk and banter exchanged. Yet there is more going on than meets the eye. For in this casual “wasting of time” may lie a potent inoculation against some of the more pernicious diseases of modern living.

You don’t have to be a particularly astute observer to recognize that the modern world is obsessed with the feeling of stress. In fact, such stress, as well as feelings of isolation, disconnectedness, and loneliness, are virtually epidemic. An ever-escalating offering of stress-reduction programs, therapies, legal and illegal drugs, and wide-screen TVs attempt to assuage such feelings. The bottom line, however, is that they often don’t work. This is because of the simple reality that people were born and bred to be part of community, to feel they are members of a tribe, to eat and drink and celebrate and suffer together. Alone, they are as bereft as the last of the passenger pigeons, or one bee in a hive. Alone, they grow so isolated that they sicken. Many prescriptions can be offered for this sickness. Yet almost free - if not free - treatments exist for the price of a cup of coffee.

Available Without Prescription

People are suffering severely from the loss of a sense of connectedness and community. This is increasingly shown by research. While it may be surprising, for instance, to read medical studies showing that participation in a support group improves outcomes for women with breast cancer, this can only be news to a medical system that has believed the historically recent idea that disease is a phenomenon solely of cells, heredity, and chemicals. By reversing the interpretation of support groups, one might claim that the “tribal healing effect” is so powerful that it can even be observed in a hospital. Can it be that a short time in a cafe in the morning increases your resistance to disease? In fact, there is some medical evidence to indicate that this may be so, and research on this very phenomenon may verify what common-sense knows to be true.

Here in Pennsylvania, for instance, there is the well-studied “Roseto Effect.” Starting in 1961, medical researchers became transfixed by this small, Italian-immigrant town in the Poconos. In Roseto, unlike in neighboring towns, the state, and the nation, residents seemed nearly immune to one of the most common causes of death: heart attacks. People died of heart attacks at a rate half of the rest of the country. In Roseto, unlike elsewhere, there were more widowers than widows.

What could be causing this dramatically higher level of health? Researchers swarmed over the town, giving physicals, measuring cholesterol, following women into their kitchens to watch them cook. People who lived in Roseto, it turned out, smoked and drank wine freely. Well, the researchers thought, maybe it’s the olive oil - based “Mediterranean diet.” Then they found that the groaning tables of Roseto weren’t the product of olive oil - that was too expensive. In Roseto, meatballs and sausages were fried in lard. It didn’t matter. So it wasn’t about serum cholesterol, apparently. What was it about? Roseto, it turns out, was an outstandingly tight-knit community. Everybody knew everybody else. Family homes held three generations. Meals took hours. Nobody applied for welfare. Concluded long-time researchers Drs. Stewart Wolf and John G. Bruhn (the latter now Provost of Penn State’s Capitol Campus): “People are nourished by other people.”


The application of this once universally-known truth was summarized by sociologist Dr. Ray Oldenburg in his aptly-named The Great Good Place - Cafe’s, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day (Paragon House, 1989.) If home is your first place, and work is your second, Oldenburg claimed, then cafes and corner taverns were a “third place.” A healthy society depends upon a balance between these three kinds of places. In Britain, everyone has their pub. In France there is still one cafe for every thirty-two adult citizens. But in America, inhabitants have increasingly tried to survive with only two: home and work. It is unlikely, Oldenburg cautions, for either a free society or an individual to survive on such a lean diet of meaningful community contact. It’s almost enough to make a person depressed.


Homespun and Professional Treatments

Depression - in fact all so-called “psychiatric” phenomena - are extraordinarily individualistic and complex. As an analytic psychotherapist, I treat people’s serious depressions, depressions which are significant, painful, and sometimes even life-threatening. For such depressions people are ill-advised to “buck up,” “slow down,” or even drink coffee. In serious depression, among other painful symptoms, all the color, verve and energy of the world can simply fade away. But a depression always tells us something about the struggle the person is in, as well as the society in which he or she lives. It is often an attempted solution to an essential problem. And it is undeniable that simply living in the modern world presents essential problems.

It is far from uncommon, for instance, for a person with far too much to do, who is plagued by feelings of isolation, and who is suffering in other ways, to walk past one or two convivial cafes on the way to fill a prescription for an antidepressant. Antidepressants are marvelous things, particularly for serious depressions, but one of their characteristics is that they often work even if taken alone in one’s lonely apartment. This is not true for coffee.

This is not to simplify the problem of depression and other afflictions. But, even in the many instances in which a convivial half-hour with the regulars in a cafe might produce miracles as great as Prozac, it simply seems impossible for many people to take that half-hour for themselves. Being driven has become unremarkable. Getting to the office a half-hour early to beat the rush has become quite common, even if it results in insomnia or an ulcer; coming in a half-hour late by way of the cafe is much less so. Yet despite fortitude and determination, there are many sensitive people who are unable to live in this incessantly busy, lonely, way.

The fatalities of the pressure which characterizes today’s American society reminds me of people with anexoria nervosa, “fasting girls.” Women with this extremely serious condition diet to the point that they can die. It is a peculiar form of death by malnutrition, for it is starving in the midst of plenty. Clinical work with such women reveals that they maintain a fixed idea that they are overweight, despite the evident fact that they are thin as rails, to the point that they weaken, to the point that their menses stop. It is the frightening consequence of a false idea. It is, as many observers have pointed out, a disease which only could emerge in a society obsessed by thinness, especially for women. No Eskimos ever had anexoria.

Likewise, overwork and incessant business have become so normal and accepted that people can starve themselves of the company of others. They rush past the cafe with the firm idea that they have too much work to do, that they have no time, that they must eat lunch at their desks. After a time, these people may go to their doctors for ulcers or depression or panic attacks or some other symptom that, insistent as an oil light in a car, is telling them that their bodies, minds, even souls, can simply not keep up the pace that they have set.

So, wake up. Disregard the incessant internal and social voices. Start leaving work early one night a week and go to the model train club, or the bowling alley, or take all the kids to see the Senators play baseball on City Island. Resolve that, barring emergencies, you are going to stop at the neighborhood cafe or diner at least three mornings a week to catch up on the local gossip. You may start to feel a lot better.

If you still feel driven by pressures, good professional care may be helpful. When it works, you may find yourself walking down the street, looking at the birds circling overhead, stopping in for some coffee and a glance at the morning paper with a new spring in your step, a new ease in encountering each day. But if you are not sure that you need this, try something close at hand and see if it works for you. Take two caupiccinos and call me in the morning. It might just work.