Glad to Be Sad: How Depression Can Help

by Emily Hill

Orig pub in The Guardian

Orig. pub date: Jan. 17, 2009 

 Don't Mess with 

the Machinery

Self-medicating...tempting to do when 
you're feeling down.  But it amplifies 
whatever is bothering you, making it 
even worse.

           Scientists say unhappiness and stress are natural biological responses and should not be suppressed by antidepressants.  Good news for people who always fail to see the silver lining on clouds.  A report in this month's New Scientist, suggests that a tendency to get down when life beats you up can be good for you.

        A growing number of cautionary voices from the world of mental-health research, the magazine reports, are claiming that it isn't a good idea to use antidepressants to help banish unhappiness in the aftermath of a marriage breakdown, bereavement or redundancy because, "they fear that the increasing tendency to treat normal sadness as if it were a disease is playing fast and loose with a crucial part of our biology.  Sadness, they argue, serves an evolutionary purpose."



        Jerome Wakefield, a clinical social worker at New York University and the co-author of The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into a Depressive Disorder, explains that depressive feelings are part of our biological makeup.

Chinese herbalists categorize what we 
call PMS-related depression into 3 meta-
bolic imbalances that manifest as either
"weepy," "angry" or "crazy" (disori-
ented).  All are easily brought into bal-
ance with specific nutritional herbs. 

Meanwhile, the best the West has to 
offer is "Midol," a mask for the pain 
with no healthful value whatsoever.  

        "When you find something this deeply in us biologically, you presume that it was selected because it had some advantage, otherwise we wouldn't have been burdened with it," he claims. "I think that one of the functions of intense negative emotions is to stop our normal functioning, to make us focus on something else for a while."

        Terence Ketter, a psychiatrist at Stanford University, in California, says: "The cost of happiness is complacency … Discontent can drive change. Certainly, you don't want to stifle or blunt emotion –emotion is information." While Paul Keedwell, a psychiatrist at Cardiff University claims that even full-blown depression may have its purpose, saving the sufferer from the effects of long-term stress. Without a mental pause, he argues, "you might stay in a state of chronic stress until you're exhausted or dead."


        Although, it is important to tread carefully when talking about depression, having the upside traced in your downside will have an irresistible appeal to all those who take the phrase "Cheer up, love, it might never happen" as a personal insult.

        It will be manna especially for creative types, who will have long suspected that crying a lot was a sign of their inward genius. During tests at Harvard, the New Scientist reports, people with signs of depression performed better at a creative task, especially after receiving feedback that was designed to reinforce their low mood.

The Tortured Artist Cliche...or Is It?

Modern medical studies lead some to 
believe that many famous artists of the past
actually suffered from Seasonal Affective 
Disorder, or S.A.D.  Today, people with 
S.A.D. can utilize a light therapy box 
during winter months to relieve symptoms.    

         Although it is a cliche to claim that creativity is connected to dour moods and a grey outlook on life, all the best stuff is written by some grim-faced pencil chewer with a heart pumped by angst.

        Richard Yates, whose novel Revolutionary Road is about to win an Oscar, has written seven novels and two collections of short stories, each more hopelessly miserable than the last.

       After years of chronicling the impossibility of his toothless, drunken mother, his experiences in the second world war, his TB and divorces, Yates finally rounds things off in Disturbing the Peace by fictionalising how a cocktail of alcoholism and psychotropic drugs had him take off his clothes and wander the streets of LA, giving all his money to beggars and prostitutes, convinced that he was Jesus. It is relentless, but so readable.

How light works as a perker-upper in our brains.

         Patrick Hamilton, whose Hangover Square is the most brilliant evocation of infatuation and hateful lust written in the last century, was made miserable throughout his life by hopeless love for a prostitute; a car accident that he referred to as "when I died"; unrequited love for an actress, and two difficult marriages –and has the novel to show for it.  Evelyn Waugh, whose work took a distinctively less jolly satiric turn in the midst of his second novel, Vile Bodies –when his first wife left him– produced great novels from a very bleak soul.

What's called "depression" I've come to 
consider an incubation period, a "mental 
pause," as this article states.  I've done 
some of my best creative work during 
these periods, saying, "I'm in my cocoon, 
leave me alone." Later, I can share with 
the world something beautiful I've 
created is .

        Ian Fleming's wife claimed that Waugh actually "liked things to go wrong" after seeing him enjoying the spectacle of a raft overturning on a Jamaican river. He was pleased –even though he was on the raft at the time.

        So, although the grand majority will never write anything as good as Yates or Hamilton or Waugh, there is something to be gained from looking on the dark side. In a work environment, for example, discontented people tend to achieve greater success than those of a sunny nature. It's enough to make a sourpuss dissolve into a Cheshire Cat grin. Excuse me while I forget to eat dinner.   Load Chelsea Hotel on repeat, hand me my Stolichnaya, I am off to have a weep.



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