in defense of sadness…
Once upon a time, if you felt sad for a few weeks and just couldn’t take pleasure in the same things that used to get you excited, it was considered a perfectly normal phenomenon. People would give you some space to figure out what was wrong and ask if you needed help. As far as medicine was concerned, your sadness was just a part of being human. Today, the same symptoms are considered to be the warning signs of a serious mental disorder to be treated with medication and therapy. Countless ads from drug companies tell you that being down for a few weeks means you that should see a doctor and ask about the newest way to mute the sad feelings. And that has some observers alarmed that sadness seems to be treated like a pathology.
First, let’s clear something up. There are crippling depressive disorders that leave people unable to function, something that requires medical attention and psychiatric help. However, there are depressive episodes that tend to be a perfectly normal part of life. Just like pain signals physical distress, depression can be a warning of mental distress. When terrible things happen, you’re supposed to feel sad. An unfortunate part of being an intelligent creature is realizing that life isn’t always peachy and bad things randomly happen to good people. If you look in the Old Testament, the question of why life seems so arbitrary and unfair greatly bothered us from the very dawn of civilization so much so, it prompted an entire theological treatise in the most important books of ancient cultures. The idea that there must be some sort of reason behind everything we see is the bedrock of most religious beliefs, one we designed to make us feel a little better about our existence.
But in the real world, we lose jobs, break up with our significant others, have fights with our loved ones or see those close to us die. The natural response of our brain is sadness. We spend sleepless nights staring at a television set without actually bothering to discern what’s on. We lose our appetite. We don’t go out unless we really have to, and even when we do, we’re quiet, sullen and our minds are somewhere else. Our brains are busy trying to process what happened and how we’ll deal with what comes next. And there’s no need for pills to lull our minds to sleep while we pretend the problems causing our depression will go away if we take just enough of those colorful tablets. Scars from traumatic events in our lives never quite heal and instead of trying to make them go away, we should take them as lessons and experiences that define our life in all its beauty and ugliness. And if you want to be masochistically creative, you can use them as a driving force behind what your big projects, channeling your frustrations and anger into energy for something useful and beneficial.
This is where medicine comes in. Some experts started worrying that the way depression is now diagnosed by mental health professionals makes it very difficult if not impossible to find the context of the issue. Feeling sad for no discernible reason and being unable to stop feeling sad long enough to get by in daily life indicates some sort of medical problem. Feeling sad as an emotional response to negative events is normal. In fact, it would be very bizarre if a person had absolutely no emotions or was always happy no matter what. But when the distinction between an emotional response and an internal dysfunction is lost, the result is an overuse of medications on people who really don’t need them. Even more dangerous is the idea that depression isn’t a normal human experience but a problem to be corrected. So next time you’re feeling down and happen to see a commercial for a chemical solution to that empty feeling, think about why it is that you’re sad before asking your doctor to write a prescription for an anti-depressant.
Oops! Sorry about that! Left a comment which didn’t go through. In my passion on the subject I appologitically dropped an ‘f’ bomb…maybe that’s why!
About your article:
YES!!! YES!!! YES!!! YES!!! and YES!!!
I grew up in the South where every five seconds someone is saying “Where’s that smile?” “Come on Sweetheart, smiled!” “Awwww….come on now, smile!” In my childhood culture, something was terribly wrong with you when you wore anything besides cheerfulness. I love smiling and being happy. I run around like a five year old a lot of the time. Some of my friends call me Tinkerbell even. But I am just as often pensive, serious, quiet, sad, or any of the other billions of places we go. It’s a wheel. Everything cycles. Like the moon and the seasons. It all rises to pass to rises to pass….
Thanks So Much for writing this!!!
Have a Great One!
Well said Greg! I don’t think I’ve ever come across commentary on this subject.
I’m a great believer in feeling the full spectrum of human responses. It’s actually surprising how much ‘stress’ (or ‘pressure’ as it’s becoming known in UK GP surgeries — you don’t get medication for stress, but you do if you call it pressure… go figure) we can take. Unfortunately, medication is often seen as the silver bullet to solve how crappy you’re feeling. The human body is actually pretty adept at coping with problems.
Unfortunately, if you keep taking unnecessary medication to smooth out the bumps in life, you’re setting yourself up for a fall. Far from being able to deal with real-life stresses in the future, you’re less able to cope if you don’t have that handy little pill to pick you up. That said, real depression can be incapacitating, and often medication is required to pull the individual out of the black, but depression is known to be overdiagnosed.
What ever happened to a stiff shot of vodka when times are tough? Oh, they do the vodka and Prozac now? Ouch. ;)
Cheers, Ian
I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder a couple of years ago, and was so relieved to have a name for what I’d been experiencing for the last few years that I didn’t really question it until much later on, when I was riding the rollercoaster of medications and side-effects.
There have been numerous times over those years that I’ve questioned whether I have a mental illness at all (it appears many people with bipolar disorder do this when they’re on an up, it’s part of the illness) – I seem to be fine most of the time, though friends would say I experience emotions more deeply and intensely than most people they know – some say it’s just a part of who I am as a person, particularly a creative person (though I think all people are creative in some manner) and I’m inclined to agree with them.
I agree with Ian in that I want to feel the full spectrum of human emotion. I think it makes life more colourful and well-rounded. Sadness is the flip-side to the coin of our happiness. I came off the meds just over a year ago. Since then I have had moments where I felt dangerously close to the edge. Still, there are long periods of happiness and sustained joy. Some people would call that hypomania, and I guess when you joy leads you to reckless behaviour you wouldn’t normally engage in, that’s a sign something is off. But I still struggle to understand whether this ‘illness’ really is something worth worrying about, if it’s even there – but even that is a part of the illness. You don’t think you need help, or that anything is wrong, until it’s too late.
So I depend on the people around me to let me know when I’m over the top. I still won’t take meds. Some people think that’s being stupid, and maybe it is, but
I’ve embraced the idea that my illness, if I do have it, is certainly not as severe as many people with bipolar disorder experience, and that even if it is, and I can’t see it myself, then I would still prefer to live my life experiencing everything as deeply and as movingly as I do, rather than numb that with meds. I get odd reactions to it, but like I say, I’d rather go out in a flaming ball of fire, than float suspended to life in a muted haze.
For many others, the decision is not that ideal or that romantic. It’s literally a choice between life and death, and when I’m on the edge, I understand that. I think what I’m trying to say, in this ridiculously long comment (sorry) is that I agree that emotions and behaviour are too quickly medicated as illness these days, but that whether someone is truly ill or impaired by those experiences should be left up to those with the illness. It sounds risky, and it probably is, but help should only come when things are undoubtedly bad. The problem is that too much diagnosis and prescriptions these days are done to prevent rather than treat. And meds that mess with your mind are not worth playing with.
Perhaps doctors don’t understand the difference between true depression and melancholy.