Depression and The Twinkie Defense

Depression and The Twinkie Defense

I'm not the first person to make the claim that eating healthy will help ease your depression. Eating a diet rich in whole foods, fish, nuts, vegetables and fruits even has preventive measures against depression, unlike diets rich in processed foods. But even before such research was conducted, the hypothesis that eating “junk food” could lead to regression in depression was made famous or infamous by the Twinkie defense.

Dan White, a former firefighter elected to the San Francisco City Board of Supervisors, was a man whose resignation had been recognized as permanent even as he wanted to return to the department - and who had returned to plow bullets into Mayor George Moscone and his own boss, Harvey Milk. And how he got away with murder.

To make a complex story a little less, White definitely didn't see eye to eye with Milk, his boss, who was a happy man when White resigned. But White reversed his resignation and tried to gain support from Moscone to go over Milk's head. Ultimately, under Milk's persuasion, Moscone refused and in November 1978 Dan White went to San Francisco City Hill with the express intention of killing Milk and Moscone, which he did most handily by shooting both men in their bodies and then, when they had already fallen, twice more in their heads.

Howeverthe interesting part comes next. White, who premeditated this assassination, pleaded not guilty by reason of diminished capacity. What reduced the above capacity? His recurring depression.

But that wasn't enough. I mean, a lot of people are depressed - and by far the vast majority of them don't go out and kill their bosses [tempting as that may sound to some of us].

Psychiatrist Martin Blinder supported this argument with what later became known as the Twinkie Defense. White's episodes of depression, claimed Dr. Blinder, were made worse by the fact that "when he felt things weren't going right, he would abandon his usual regimen of exercise and good nutrition and start loading up on junk food: Twinkies, [pop]"" [see the "Trial Testimony of Dr. Martin Blinder (defense psychiatrist)"].

(In case you missed it, it was this last quote that led to Blinder's argument for the wonderful title "The Twinkie Defense.")

White had been in a funk the entire time - a junk food-infested funk - but when he found out definitively that he wasn't getting his job back, he sat up all night drinking quantities of soda pop and eating high-sugar cupcakes and candy bars "(SeeLegal proceedings against an expertby Dr. Harold L. Klawans, p. 165).

Thus, not only was White depressed, but he was depressed and “high” on junk food, which resulted in reduced capacity.

And that, the jury thought, was reason enough to find mitigating circumstances for White's crime because of his diminished capacity.

If replacing a healthy diet with junk food is so damaging to a man's depression that it could lead to murder - couldn't it be bad for you too?

As Hippocrates said – and shouldn’t he know? – “Let food be your medicine, let your medicine be your food.”

Inspired by Candida Abrahamson Ph.D.