A couple of years ago I wrote a post titled, “Am I Bad For Being Sad?” There I discussed the tendency in our society to promote the notion that when we experience sadness it is a symptom indicating there is something wrong with us. I then asked readers to consider the possibility that this notion may be disrespectful and harmful, and it may be far better to frame our sad experiences as healthy, and a process that serves the function of planning our future. In that post, to encourage readers to think about this, I used two parables and a New York Times article in which the writer relates the experience of a woman dealing with sadness. Today, let’s take a quick look at a summary of that earlier post, and then I’ll discuss a research article that helps to deepen a discussion of this issue.
A Brief Summary of the Earlier Post
In the first parable, a mother tells her son it is time to go to bed, he resists, and eventually he begins to cry. The mother responds:
Don’t you dare start with this crap or I’ll give you a real reason to cry! You’re acting like an infant!!! Now you stop this instant and get to bed!!!”
In the second parable, the same set of circumstances occurs except that the mother replies to her son’s tears differently. Instead of getting angry, she says in a caring manner:
“I see you are feeling sad. That’s understandable. You were enjoying the game so much, and you’re disappointed about having to stop. You know, when we feel sad, it’s to help us figure out how to better handle what we do in the future. I wonder how we can better handle the going to bed situation. Any ideas, Carl?”
After presenting these two parables, I asked readers some questions:
Will this mother’s response in the first parable to her son’s sadness lead him in time to not only feel sad about whatever led to his sad feelings, but additionally, to feel bad for not living up to his mother’s expectations of what a good, mature person should feel during disappointments?
Might he, thus, learn to have a kind of double depression each time he is disappointed–depression at the disappointment, plus depression because he is depressed?
With this mother’s approach, might he eventually become motivated to drown his negative emotions in alcohol, or mask them with illegal or prescription drugs?
In contrast to the first parable, the second one has the mother explaining that the experience of sadness is natural and has the potential to be helpful. I noted that this doesn’t instantly eliminate a period of sadness. Then I asked readers:
Is it possible that by viewing sadness as natural and helpful, might it eliminate much of the self-insults that make a sad experience worse?
Might it also helpfully guide attention toward constructing positive future plans?
After discussing these questions, I then went on to the New York Times article that I used to further deepen the sadness discussion. There, the writer tells us about Laura.
When Laura was young, she saw a psychiatrist because from time to time she would begin to sob. He convinced Laura there was something wrong with her and sold her on the idea that she needed to take a prescribed pill. Before long he had her taking a whole cocktail of pills.
When on the drugs, Laura said, “I never had a baseline sense of myself.”
Eventually, Laura began to question her psychiatrist’s medical model, and although she suffered through the process of weaning herself off the prescription drugs, finally she reported that she felt as if she were learning the contours of her adult self for the first time. When she felt dread or despair, she tried to accept the sensation without interpreting it as a sign that she was defective. “It felt like a revelation,” she said, “to realize that the objective in being alive isn’t the absence of pain.” The article concludes with Laura stating, “I never felt helped by the drugs in the sense that I have meaning, I have purpose, I have relationships that matter to me.”
There is quite a bit more that I covered in my earlier post on this subject, and I hope you consider reading it (see HERE). In that post, I relied chiefly on stories to illustrate the relevant issues, for stories are particularly helpful in making sense of life’s challenges. However, there is another path toward understanding–scientific research. So, let us now turn to a research article employing the scientific method that focuses its keen eye directly on today’s topic.
The Research Article
A team of researchers (Brock Bastian, et al.) published an article in the peer reviewed journal Emotion titled, “Feeling Bad About Being Sad: The Role of Social Expectancies in Amplifying Negative Mood.” The authors begin by summarizing previous relevant research, then describe four studies they carried out to throw light on this subject, and then present their conclusions. The entire article can be viewed for free HERE. It is a bit long and written using some technical language and complicated statistics so I thought I would provide the gist of it to those who prefer a shorter read.
Upon reviewing previous research, they found evidence that in many cultures people are expected to strive for happiness and not to feel sad or stressed. Moreover, happiness has been enthusiastically promoted as important for personal well-being and a meaningful life. Even common malaise is often diagnosed as an illness and is considered detrimental to our own and others’ health.”
The authors go on to say,
One does not need to look far to see which emotions are socially valued and more normative than others. Daily we are reminded of the value of happiness, from TV advertising that highlights the hedonic pleasures of consumption, to national campaigns designed to improve happiness and well-being. Meanwhile, commonplace emotional experiences such as sadness, depression, or anxiety are pathologized and medicalized, viewed as deviant from desired norms…. Negative emotions are touted as bad for our health… and can be “cured” with an array of drugs and interventions designed to quickly and efficiently return us to normality. On the other hand, the many benefits of negative emotions, such as their creative potential…, importance for interpersonal relations…, and role in achieving a rich and meaningful life… are rarely prominent in current social discourse.
When the authors write that the benefits of negative emotions are rarely prominent in current social discourse, they are referring to modern Western individualistic cultures such as Australia, Great Britain, and the United States. They contrast these Western cultures with the very different attitudes of many people in Asia. Thus, the authors write,
[T]he importance placed on happiness and the devaluation of sadness is not as apparent in Asian cultures. In Japan, acceptance, emotional balance, and even hardship are highly valued, and the pursuit of happiness often has “immoral” connotations.
Now, after the authors described the previous research that I have sought to summarize, they then begin to describe their four original studies. In brief, hundreds of people, mostly Australians, but some from Japan, were asked to rate several of their personal characteristics on a scale that ranged from 1 (strongly disagree) to 9 (strongly agree). Examples of the characteristics they were asked to rate themselves on are:
Feeling sad makes me dislike myself.
When I feel sad I feel like a bad person.
It is very important to me not to feel sad.
I would always try to avoid feeling sad.
Feeling sad is normal.
Feeling sad is an important part of life.
There is far more to these four studies than just having people rating themselves, but this gives you some idea of what was done.
Among the findings, there was a clear tendency for Australian individuals to feel worse about themselves when experiencing negative emotions than the Japanese individuals who were more likely to view sadness as normal and helpful.
The authors’ final conclusions, after looking at the result of all four studies, are:
Emotions are fundamentally social phenomena. Our research provides the first evidence that people’s generalized beliefs about how others expect them to feel may play a central role in their emotional experience and well-being. Our work shows that the more people hold beliefs that others expect them not to experience negative emotions, the more frequently and intensely they are likely to experience those negative emotions. Such ironic effects also relate to indicators of well-being, such as satisfaction with life and depression. Moreover, our findings suggest that these relationships are at least partly mediated by negative self-evaluations that people have when they experience undesired emotions. Attempts to promote the value of feeling good over the value of feeling bad by emphasizing social norms for these emotions may therefore have the effect of making people feel bad more often.
Now, relevant to this discussion, there does exist some evidence that sometimes people who experience depression end up hurting themselves, or lapse into periods in which their functioning diminishes. This evidence is used by many psychiatrists to urge people to take psychiatric drugs. But, is it really the depression that leads these people to hurt themselves, or is it how they respond to their sad feelings that lead to various undesirable outcomes?
In contrast to the medical model that urges drug treatment, there is evidence that the drug treatments increase suicide and disabilities.
Robert Whitaker
For an excellent review of this evidence see Robert Whitaker’s fine book, Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America.
Now, let’s say you were brought up immersed in a culture that favors happiness over negative emotions. If you had become convinced it would be wise to change your old habits of self-hate when experiencing depression, perhaps you might find it hard to break those habits. What can you do?
By reading this blog beginning with the earliest post can help to support making the change. You can begin at the earliest post by clicking HERE. Two of its benefits are, it is completely free, and you can utilize it at your own pace.
Another approach is to go to a personal counselor well trained in promoting the notions that sadness is helpful and self compassion is a better way to deal with it. The personal interaction with a skilled, supportive counselor can be a powerful motivator to make the needed changes in your life. Its chief drawback is its financial cost.
If you do wish to utilize this approach, I can recommend two professionals who are excellent–my son, Jack Star Rubin, and his wife, Emily. Their services are provided online via Skype or Zoom. You can access their webpages HERE.
OK then, I think I’ll end this discussion for now. That said, please feel free to extend it in the comment section below.
My Best
Jeff
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Some people will enjoy reading this blog by beginning with the first post and then moving forward to the next more recent one; then to the next one; and so on. This permits readers to catch up on some ideas that were presented earlier and to move through all of the ideas in a systematic fashion to develop their emotional intelligence. To begin at the very first post you can click HERE.
Since as far back as she can remember, Carla, 19-years-old, has been having periods during which she has waves of deeply sad feelings. She has family members who say that depression runs in their family, and she should see a psychiatrist for treatment. So, off she goes, and after a few questions, the psychiatrist declares she has a mental illness called Major Depressive Disorder. Carla is prescribed pills referred to as antidepressants.
She soon feels a little better, but begins to experience a number of side effects, among them, her sex drive is diminished. Her boyfriend soon breaks up with her, and she has a new bout with sadness. Her doctor increases her dose of pills, and adds some additional ones as well, which seems to work. But in time, new waves of sadness occur, so she goes back to the doctor. He now sets her up with a series of electroconvulsive shock treatments, which her doctor calls Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT). Her memory begins to suffer, but after each series she does feel her mood rise.
Some who know Carla, respect her for facing the fact that she has a mental illness and is seeking sound medical advice to have it treated. Others who know her, upon seeing her turning to pills and ECT, regard her as foolish and lose respect for her.
In contrast to how Carla construes her waves of deeply sad feeling, some view it as an artistic temperament, and learn to appreciate these visits of melancholy as something of extraordinary value. Thus, in an earlier post titled William James’s Personal Bout With a “Mental Disorder,” we looked at how the brilliant psychologist and philosopher came to view his “bass notes of experience.” On this subject, he wrote that many so called “healthy-minded” individuals believe that those who worry are “morbid-minded” and “diseased,” but it may very well be true that “the world’s meaning most comes home to us when we lay them most to heart.” He went on to write that,
“there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.”
Recently in the New York Times I met up with another writer who genuinely appreciates periods of sadness.
Ms. Laren Stover
In an article titled “The Case for Melancholy,” Ms. Laren Stover weaves a very different perspective from Carla, the individual I described at the start of this post who has an image of herself as a “sufferer of mental illness, and a consumer of antidepressants and ECT.”
Ms. Stover, after telling us of her weariness of all those folks on the internet promising to show us how to be delightfully happy in just a few short steps, writes:
“Whatever happened to experiencing the grace of melancholy, which requires reflection: a sort of mental steeping, like tea? What if all this cheerful advice only makes you feel inadequate? What if you were born morose?”
It is of course not alway easy to bear these experiences, but one can begin to observe the beauty of it:
“It visits you like a mist, a vapor, a fog. It is generally uninvited. And as some people are born into royalty, wealth and prestige, others inherit a disposition for sadness.”
Notice how Ms. Stover pairs this experience with images of being born into royalty, wealth and prestige. In contrast, the mental illness promoters would much prefer to have us associate such experiences with being stuck with an awful disease we can only learn to manage with psychiatric drugs and, if that doesn’t prove sufficient, ECT.
Laren continues to weave her artistic images of melancholy with such words as:
“Sadness has a bad reputation. But I soon came to feel that melancholy — the word itself is late Latin from the Greek melancholia — is a word with a romantic Old World ring, with a transient beauty like the ring around the moon.”
And in another fine phrase, she tells us:
“it is fine to indulge in the cloudy charms of melancholy: to watch a sad black-and-white movie or to be swept away by the wind making a sound that Truman Capote described as a grass harp.”
My favorite line in Ms. Stover’s article is actually a quote from her late father, a writer who published 24 books, and apparently also dealt with the many challenges of melancholy: “I don’t know if you’ll be a writer,” he tells his daughter, ” but you have the ‘up down’ thing too. Make creative use of it, otherwise, people will think you’re just plain nuts.”
In our society, with its commercials every few minutes on TV telling us of all of the wonderful benefits of treating the terrible disease of depression with drugs, it is not easy to come to the artistic temperament point of view. And there are many good people that you will meet who genuinely believe that they have been saved from the depths of despair by doctors who utilize the medical model. If you choose to follow them down that road, I do wish you well. I have no desire to stop people from following the path that makes the most sense to them.
But for those who have not made their decision on what direction to head questionably into that dark night, I do gently ask for a momentary pause. Yes, in the physical illness domain, many medical procedures produce amazing outcomes. And it is therefore understandable that people will be eager to seek help from those who practice this medical approach to help in the domain of psychological distress. But it is worth noting that doctors can be terribly wrong at times. In the same issue of The New York Times as Ms. Stover’s article appears, we can find an article titled “How Doctors Helped Drive the Addiction Crisis.” It points out that,
OxyContin’s long-acting formulation makes it popular but also prone to abuse.
“The rate of death from prescription opioids in the United States increased more than fourfold between 1999 and 2010, dwarfing the combined mortality from heroin and cocaine. In 2013 alone, opioids were involved in 37 percent of all fatal drug overdoses.
Driving this opioid epidemic, in large part, is a disturbing change in the attitude within the medical profession about the use of these drugs to treat pain.”
We have reviewed a great deal of evidence of the effects of antidepressants on serotonergic processes throughout the body. Some of the effects are widely known, but they have been largely ignored in debates about the utility of antidepressants. Indeed, it is widely believed that antidepressant medications are both safe and effective; however, this belief was formed in the absence of adequate scientific verification. The weight of current evidence suggests that, in general, antidepressants are neither safe nor effective; they appear to do more harm than good.
Recent findings with regards to the previous standard medical recommendations for breast cancer and prostate screenings now indicate they led to far more harm than good for millions of patients.
And so, pausing, and considering an alternative way to think about melancholy may be well worth your while. If you feel you just can’t go it alone, meditation has been an enormous help for me in discovering a deeper understanding of these experiences. My son, Jack, has found his Vipassana meditation retreat experiences of enormous value, and the cost for these retreats is on a voluntary donation basis. Some counselors and psychotherapists who have not fallen hook, line and sinker into the medical model view of these types of challenging experiences, can be of great help to make the transition from ugliness to beauty.
Well, I hope this discussion has deepened the reader’s views of melancholy, sadness and tears. Until you join us again right here at “From Insults to Respect,” may all of your concerns be addressed with wisdom, love, and kindness.
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Some people will enjoy reading this blog by beginning with the first post and then moving forward to the next more recent one; then to the next one; and so on. This permits readers to catch up on some ideas that were presented earlier and to move through all of the ideas in a systematic fashion to develop their emotional intelligence. To begin at the very first post you can click HERE.
A couple of years ago I wrote a post titled, “Am I Bad For Being Sad?” There I discussed the tendency in our society to promote the notion that when we experience sadness it is a symptom indicating there is something wrong with us. I then asked readers to consider the possibility that this notion may be disrespectful and harmful, and it may be far better to frame our sad experiences as healthy, and a process that serves the function of planning our future. In that post, to encourage readers to think about this, I used two parables and a New York Times article in which the writer relates the experience of a woman dealing with sadness. Today, let’s take a quick look at a summary of that earlier post, and then I’ll discuss a research article that helps to deepen a discussion of this issue.Don’t you dare start with this crap or I’ll give you a real reason to cry! You’re acting like an infant!!! Now you stop this instant and get to bed!!!”
“I see you are feeling sad. That’s understandable. You were enjoying the game so much, and you’re disappointed about having to stop. You know, when we feel sad, it’s to help us figure out how to better handle what we do in the future. I wonder how we can better handle the going to bed situation. Any ideas, Carl?”
A team of researchers (Brock Bastian, et al.) published an article in the peer reviewed journal Emotion titled, “Feeling Bad About Being Sad: The Role of Social Expectancies in Amplifying Negative Mood.” The authors begin by summarizing previous relevant research, then describe four studies they carried out to throw light on this subject, and then present their conclusions. The entire article can be viewed for free HERE. It is a bit long and written using some technical language and complicated statistics so I thought I would provide the gist of it to those who prefer a shorter read.
Daily we are reminded of the value of happiness, from TV advertising that highlights the hedonic pleasures of consumption, to national campaigns designed to improve happiness and well-being.
Meanwhile, commonplace emotional experiences such as sadness, depression, or anxiety are pathologized and medicalized, viewed as deviant from desired norms…. Negative emotions are touted as bad for our health… and can be “cured” with an array of drugs and interventions designed to quickly and efficiently return us to normality. On the other hand, the many benefits of negative emotions, such as their creative potential…, importance for interpersonal relations…, and role in achieving a rich and meaningful life… are rarely prominent in current social discourse.
[T]he importance placed on happiness and the devaluation of sadness is not as apparent in Asian cultures. In Japan, acceptance, emotional balance, and even hardship are highly valued, and the pursuit of happiness often has “immoral” connotations.
Among the findings, there was a clear tendency for Australian individuals to feel worse about themselves when experiencing negative emotions than the Japanese individuals who were more likely to view sadness as normal and helpful.Emotions are fundamentally social phenomena. Our research provides the first evidence that people’s generalized beliefs about how others expect them to feel may play a central role in their emotional experience and well-being. Our work shows that the more people hold beliefs that others expect them not to experience negative emotions, the more frequently and intensely they are likely to experience those negative emotions. Such ironic effects also relate to indicators of well-being, such as satisfaction with life and depression.
Moreover, our findings suggest that these relationships are at least partly mediated by negative self-evaluations that people have when they experience undesired emotions. Attempts to promote the value of feeling good over the value of feeling bad by emphasizing social norms for these emotions may therefore have the effect of making people feel bad more often.
Now, relevant to this discussion, there does exist some evidence that sometimes people who experience depression end up hurting themselves, or lapse into periods in which their functioning diminishes. This evidence is used by many psychiatrists to urge people to take psychiatric drugs. But, is it really the depression that leads these people to hurt themselves, or is it how they respond to their sad feelings that lead to various undesirable outcomes?
