Welcome to From Insults to Respect.
My previous post utilizes the Kinks song “Low Budget” to sympathetically discuss how our money woes can take a bite out of our feelings of respect for ourselves and others, while suggesting some helpful approaches to deal effectively with such challenges. The positive feedback that I received led me to see if I might utilize another Kinks song, partly just for the fun of it, but also as a way to explore some issues relevant to respect.
On this blog, I have on several occasions (see HERE and HERE) made the case for the value of transforming periods of depression into the more helpful experience of melancholy. It just so happens that the Kinks song, “Misfits,” offers us a wonderful opportunity to further enhance this pregnant idea.
After the first introduction verse, Ray Davies sings,
You say your summer has gone
Now the Winter is crawlin’ in
They say that even in your day
Somehow you never could quite fit in
Though it’s cold outside
I know the Summer’s gonna come again
Because you know what they say
Every dog has his day
These words suggest Ray is singing about you, the listener, but as I interpret it, he’s also singing about his own feelings. He’s feeling emotionally chilly with the way things are going for him. He has a desire to comfortably fit in socially, but he’s not there. You, the listener, might feel this way from time to time as well. Within this emotional state, Ray seems to be seeking to turn his attention to a more hopeful future, with the return of a warmer weather, happier period.
The chorus then goes on to say,
You’re a misfit, afraid of yourself, so you run away and hide
You’ve been a misfit all your life
Why don’t you join the crowd
And come inside
You wander round this town like you’ve lost your way
You had your chance in your day
Yet you threw it all away
But you know what they say
Every dog has his day
Here, Ray sees his difficulty is made worse by running away and hiding from it. He’s also bemoaning that there were actions he could have taken back in his day but failed to do so. Still, he seeks to bolster his spirits with the hope his day will come.
The song’s bridge tells us to,
Look at all the losers and the mad eyed gazers
Look at all the looneys and the sad eyed failures
They’re giving up living ‘cos they just don’t care
So take a good look around
The misfits are everywhere
La la la la la la
We see here Ray throwing the typical insults at those with the shortcomings and feelings he and the others are singing about. At the same time, he recognizes they are not alone; there are folks all around us having similar feelings, and they are giving up living. This giving up doesn’t sit well with Ray, so he launches into the next verse that seeks to lift our spirits:
This is your chance, this is your time
So don’t throw it away
You can have your day
‘Cause it’s true what they say
Every dog has his day
In the song, we see Ray using two approaches to deal with how he is feeling–insulting himself, and trying to lift his spirits with hopeful, positive words. On this blog, when people are singing the blues and insulting themselves, we say they are experiencing depression. One type of approach to kick yourself out of depression is to focus on some positives, such as the fact that you have company with what you are going through and keeping hope alive for a more positive day. But there is a dramatically different alternative for dealing with the blues than these two, an approach I refer to as melancholy.
Consider how musician and song writer Joni Mitchell described melancholy in her beautiful song, “Hijira.”
There is comfort in melancholy where there is no need to explain, it’s just as natural as the weather in this moody sky today.
She sees melancholy as a comfortable state and natural.
At another point, Joni tells us such experience “can be the sand that makes the pearl…. Most of my best work came out of it. If you get rid of the demons and the disturbing things, then the angels fly off, too. There is the possibility, in the mire, of an epiphany.”
In a New York Times article titled “The Case for Melancholy” we learn from American writer Laren Stover about her own personal experiences. 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, she 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?”
Laren continues to weave her creative 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.”
Here’s how the great psychologist, William James, viewed the subject at hand. 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, himself, learned to appreciate these visits of melancholy as something of extraordinary value, and stated 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.
Although the pharmaceutical industry has spent millions seeking to convince us that these types of experiences are pathological, a sickness, requiring drug “treatment,” Jon Kabat-Zinn, an American professor emeritus of medicine and the creator of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, tells us,
If we listen carefully to the body, it can teach us a great deal about what is most difficult for us to recognize and come to terms with from the past, and how we might approach our hurt with kindness and wisdom.
We can learn to respect and honor melancholy. Yes, as we do so, from old habits curses along with efforts seeking to bolster these bluesy experiences may arise. We can come to recognize them as old habits while not absolutely accepting their validity. During all of this we can learn to become friends with the underlying experience, patiently, empathically, being with them, spending time with this natural, healthy way to process life’s challenges.
Well, them are my thoughts for this week. Love to all the Kinks fans out there.
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.
There’s comfort in melancholy
As another example, we learned in an 
When the sun shines
All of this leads to the person experiencing periods of self-loathing. As a result, they develop what some call a double depression–not only are they depressed, they are depressed that they are depressed.
Feeling depressed? If so, you may decide to consult with a psychiatrist or other medical doctor. By doing so, chances are your description of your feelings will be translated into a language of symptoms, diagnosis, and mental illness, and you will leave the doctor’s office with a prescription for pills marketed as “antidepressants.” Unfortunately, this medicalization approach is so inconsistent with scientific evidence that many people view it as a remarkably successful flimflam funded by the enormously wealthy pharmaceutical industry.
To throw light on this, today’s post briefly summarizes the scientific theory that runs counter to the mainstream psychiatric pathologizing “antidepressant” approach. Then, it addresses the question, Are doctors and the pharmaceutical industry supporting the pathologizing of depression really engaging in deliberate deception?
A few weeks ago I presented a 
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.
Psychologist William James, back in 1902, in his classic book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, provides us a ton of such examples. Most of them involve a religious conversion experience, but James also provides examples that appear to be a result of “…the eruption into the individual’s life of some new stimulus or passion, such as love, ambition, cupidity, revenge, or patriotic devotion.”
A recent 
Depression is an adaptation that evolved because it keeps organisms focused on (ruminating about) complex social issues until they can be resolved and that medications work not so much by addressing a nonexistent deficit in neurotransmitters in the synapse as by perturbing underlying regulatory mechanisms to the point that they reassert homeostatic control over those systems. If the latter is true then medications may work to suppress symptoms in a manner that leaves the underlying episode unaddressed and patients at elevated risk of relapse whenever they are taken away. 
For example, he describes studies that demonstrate depressed individuals who are treated to remission with cognitive therapy are less than half as likely to relapse following treatment termination as a matched group of depressed folks treated to remission with antidepressant medications. He goes on from here to argue that some people have trouble working through their depression efficiently because they misinterpret life events in a negative fashion and that cognitive therapy helps them examine the accuracy of their beliefs, and by so doing it relieves their distress more quickly. Prof. Hollon goes on to say, “it 
Although Prof. Hollon focusses on the benefits of cognitive therapy, other research has found that counseling that focusses on resolving interpersonal problems, and humanistic approaches to therapy that empathetically values what each person is going through, are also often helpful. Such approaches avoid the numerous side effects of “antidepressants” and the awful withdrawal reactions that occur upon ending one’s reliance on drug treatment.
As long as the drug has been approved by the FDA for depression, then I’m willing to give it a try with my patients. In time, I carefully monitor whether or not the drug is being helpful. With the antidepressants most of my patients have done well on them, and several have told me it has saved their life. I also want to add that the leading experts in the field support the use of these antidepressants as first line treatments for depression and argue that it would be malpractice to not prescribe them to depressed patients. Even if I was to agree with your research analysis, I could not risk getting sued for malpractice.
As far as the pharmaceutical industry engaging in a flimflam, here I have little first hand knowledge to draw any firm conclusions. My knowledge chiefly comes from reading The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us And What To Do About It. It was written by Marcia Angell, M.D., the former editor in chief of the prestigious medical journal The New England Journal of Medicine and she is currently a member of Harvard Medical School’s Department of Social Medicine. I came away from reading her book thinking that the enormous profit motive in the industry does lead to substantial bias in how research is carried out and the information they provide to medical doctors.
I do think the FDA does serve a valuable function for evaluating treatments for diseases that have clearly objective criteria for identifying their existence. For example, when patients who have a cancerous tumor, it can be objectively seen by doctors with the use of an imaging device. How large each of the patient’s tumor is can be assessed objectively by measuring its circumference. In a clinical trial that has half of the patients randomly assigned to a group that gets a placebo, and the other half to a new drug, if, after three months, the placebo group’s subjects tend to have tumors that grew larger, while those getting the new drug have shrunk, this shows a clear benefit for the drug treatment.
Unlike these types of objectively identifiable conditions, with depression doctors rely on a subjective indication of effectiveness, that is, a conversation. Moreover, the studies that the FDA looked at to approve the “antidepressants” were done with patients who took the actual drugs for a mere few weeks, even though doctors regularly advocate that their patients take the drug for far longer, often for the rest of their life. It is the long term studies that came out after the FDA approval process that has begun to indicate that these drugs are likely to be worse than non-drug approaches.
Recall that doctors often will defend their use of “antidepressant” by saying, “With the antidepressants, most of my patients have done well on them, and several have told me it has saved their life.” The problem with this, as noted earlier in this post, is that people with depression spontaneously recover at a high rate even without treatment. It is this fact that leads to the doctor’s misattribution.
Consider another example. Dr. Smith has prescribed an “antidepressant” for depressed patient Marc. Not feeling any better despite taking the drug for several weeks, Dr. Smith tells Mark, “It takes time for the drug to have an effect, so give it a little more time.” A few more weeks go by with no improvement, so Dr. Smith tells Marc, the dose of the drug needs a little adjustment because some folks need a little more than others. When a few more weeks go by with no improvement, Dr. Smith responds by prescribing a different “antidepressant.”
I have presented the case that medical doctors typically genuinely believe their prescriptions for”antidepressants” are effective, and therefore are not deliberately seeking to mislead their patients in order to make more money. Their process of coming to their belief about the effectiveness of these types of drugs is indeed deeply flawed, but a quality evaluation appears to be a too arduous process for each doctor to perform. I have heard that in my area doctors in medical practice for a medical company find their company advocates each patient be seen for a mere few minutes. I do think medical doctors must understand that their drug information is coming from people selling the drugs. Although I respect doctors for their life saving efforts, I would respect them more if they would ban together and hire a team of epidemiologists to provide an independent evaluation of the risk and benefits of these treatments.
When I discuss problems with the “antidepressant” approach for dealing with depression, some folks who are currently taking such drugs sometimes decide to stop taking their pills. Suddenly stopping them all at once can be risky because of a variety of distressing withdrawal reactions possibly including waves of suicidal feelings. For help in deciding on the safest way to go about the withdrawal process, I recommend tapping into Mad In America’s “Drug Withdrawal Resources” page (see 
A couple of years ago I wrote a post titled, “
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 
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. 
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?
Imagine your thirteen-year-old teenage daughter begins to express a concern about being depressed. Many in the psychiatric profession, heavily backed up by the pharmaceutical industry, would urge you to make an appointment with a psychiatrist as fast as you can. That approach typically leads to the doctor encouraging your daughter to take pills referred to as “antidepressants.” The main argument that is made for beginning this type of treatment is, “untreated depression is associated with an increased risk of suicide.”
This fear arousing comment frequently works because parents tend to jump from this statement to the thought that treatment with so-called antidepressants either eliminates this risk or significantly reduces it. But a large body of 
Moreover, these drugs are associated with a number of troubling side effects, and many find that once they start using them, stopping them can lead to some awful withdrawal reactions that are far worse than the initial experience of depression.
Your letter came last night and explained sufficiently the cause of your long silence. You have evidently been in a bad state of spirits again, and dissatisfied with your environment; and I judge that you have been still more dissatisfied with the inner state of trying to consume your own smoke, and grin and bear it, so as to carry out your mother’s behests made after the time when you scared us so by your inexplicable tragic outcries in those earlier letters. Well! I believe you have been trying to do the manly thing under difficult circumstances, but one learns only gradually to do the best thing; and the best thing for you would be to write at least weekly, if only a post-card, and say just how things are going. If you are in bad spirits, there is no harm whatever in communicating that fact, and defining the character of it, or describing it as exactly as you like. The bad thing is to pour out the contents of one’s bad spirits on others and leave them with it, as it were, on their hands, as if it was for them to do something about it. That was what you did in your other letter which alarmed us so, for your shrieks of anguish were so excessive, and so unexplained by anything you told us in the way of fact, that we didn’t know but what you had suddenly gone crazy. That is the worst sort of thing you can do. The middle sort of thing is what you do this time—namely, keep silent for more than a fortnight, and when you do write, still write mysteriously about your sorrows, not quite open enough.
Now, my dear little girl, you have come to an age when the inward life develops and when some people (and on the whole those who have most of a destiny) find that all is not a bed of roses. Among other things there will be waves of terrible sadness, which last sometimes for days; and dissatisfaction with one’s self, and irritation at others, and anger at circumstances and stony insensibility, etc., etc., which taken together form a melancholy. Now, painful as it is, this is sent to us for an enlightenment. It always passes off, and we learn about life from it, and we ought to learn a great many good things if we react on it rightly. 
She went on to attend Bryn Mawr College, acted in a couple of plays, married, and had two children. She was viewed as the best of citizens in San Francisco, working with the civil rights group, supporting the Community Chest operations and heading up the Ladies’ Protection and Relief, and devoted her time as war began in 1939 to British War Relief. Throughout her life, she did have two more bouts with depression, but she handled them well. The last one, at her husband’s urging, she went with him hiking in the foothills near Santa Clara, and after a while, the exhilarating experience of being in the wonderful and exhilarating landscape, along with the lively exercise, led to the depression passing. The family legend pronounced this a California cure for a New England psychological illness.
Elsewhere in the letter, James begins to frame Peg’s experience as helpful for producing “an enlightenment,” if “we react on it rightly.” The wrong way, according to James, is to get into the habit of accepting the woe without doing anything constructive about it. The right way is “to jump at every chance to attend to anything cheerful or comic or take part in anything active that will divert us from our mean, pining inward state of feeling.”
I believe that, rather than fighting against melancholy, we should allow ourselves some time to be with it, just as we would if an old friend came to visit. We can spend this time observing, in a nonjudgmental manner, the emotions drifting through us in a manner similar to a scientist observing a flock of birds flying off in the distant sky. When it comes to grief, we need not set some artificial time limit by which we “should be” through with the process.
Let’s begin this exploration with a diary entry from a mental patient that appears on page 224 in Richard P. Bentall’s fine book, Madness Explained:
Once we, in our modern society, come to associate anxiety and grief as painful, this leads many of us right into the idea that we best manage it as we do when we experience physical pain, that is, by distracting our minds to something pleasant and washing the feelings away by consuming alcohol and other drugs. And yet, even when dealing with physical pain, these two approaches are often far from optimal.
In research studies, when distracting oneself from pain was compared to a “sensory focus” approach, sensory focus came out distinctly better even for when dealing with the particularly challenging pain that occurs while giving birth (see 
Drugs that contain acetaminophen, like Tylenol, are the leading cause of acute liver failure in the United States, and some studies indicate that it can be harmful to kidneys as well. Each year, the side effects of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), which are commonly used for pain, cause nearly 103,000 hospitalizations and 16,500 deaths. More people die each year from NSAIDs-related complications than from AIDS and cervical cancer in the United States. Common over the counter NSAIDs include ibuprofen (Motrin, Advil) and naproxen (Aleve).
Let’s begin here with a series of studies indicating that how we conceptualize emotional arousing experiences can dramatically alter the experience.
These studies began in earnest back in 1964 when a team of researchers presented a film showing primitive adolescent “subincision” rites to their subjects and found that it produced marked stress reactions. However, when some subjects were coached to view the film as if they were objective scientists, their stress reaction was markedly reduced. The findings supported the conclusion that the same visual stimulus varies in the amount of stress produced depending upon the nature of the cognitive appraisal the person makes.
Subsequent studies replicated this study by using a series of films that showed horrific workplace accidents, and again, altering the cognitive appraisal strategy of the subjects, altered the level of stress experienced. So, perhaps altering how we appraise our experience with anxiety and grief might alter our level of stress for the better.
We have, for over two million years, been evolving ways to address our concerns so we have a better chance to survive and to pass our genes on to subsequent generations. Two of our most common concerns involve perceiving a risk of future danger, which we experience as anxiety, and perceiving we have lost something or someone important to us, which we experience as grief. Recognizing these types of concerns is the first step in a more complete process of finding ways to minimize the risk of danger and to successfully move forward despite our losses.
When we put off dealing with these types of concerns, they don’t just go away; they come back again and again reminding us that we have to adequately address them. Despite our efforts at putting them off, as our concerns begin to accumulate without being fully addressed, it becomes harder and harder to delay dealing with them. Our memory begins to remind us of them more frequently and more intensely until we reach a point at which we must attend to them, like it or not. If we put off taking time to process our concerns for too long, our functioning for dealing with many aspects of life can begin to deteriorate, and at some point, we may end up having what some people refer to as a mental breakdown.
So, with this understanding, anxiety and grief are part of a wonderful process, rather than a sign of mental illness that we need to distract ourselves from or to take drugs to manage. Part of this process requires that we devote enough time to process these concerns or the level of intensity is liable to become more and more challenging.
When we are reminded of our perceived dangers and grief, rather than automatically perceiving such experiences as painful, we can allow ourselves to observe the physical sensations that come with it. If words such as, “Man, this is painful,” “Man, this is hurting,” or, “I can’t stand this suffering,” we can observe them without automatically accepting them as accurate. What is accurate is the physical sensations, and the specific concern to be addressed as best as you can fathom. Once the sensations go through us, we naturally begin to spend some time thinking about some ideas to address the concerns.
Well, recently I published a post titled, “The Nature of Depression and Melancholy” (see 
Depression and melancholy, as I explained more fully in 
This memory can be visualized as a bucket. When it is only slightly filled, each time the memory warns you that you have some work to do in order to deal with your various concerns, you can, if you so choose, easily put off dealing with them until a more convenient time by shifting your attention so you can carry out some other task.
As the concerns become more frequent, or feel more intense, some medical doctors, particularly psychiatrists, will be eager to classify your experience as a symptom of a mental disorder and prescribe drugs to deal with this. It is a lucrative business model, but in my opinion, this causes more harm than good. 
One way or another, concerns have to be addressed, and masking them with substances that have a variety of harmful side effects will only lead to more concerns in the long run.
We can visualize this as being born with either a large, average, or small concern memory bucket. For those who are born with a relatively large concern bucket, they can hold more concerns and larger, more serious concerns before their bucket begins to become filled than an average person. Thus, they can go for longer periods before they begin to have more and more difficulty shifting their attention away from their concerns. Others who are born with smaller buckets find that it takes less time than the average person for it to begin to fill up. Thus, even when facing relatively few and minor concerns than the average person, they nevertheless begin to have more and more difficulty shifting their attention away from their concerns.
For example, meditating once or twice a day provides an opportunity to spend time addressing concerns with little distractions. Although as we enter into meditation, we don’t do so with the intent to address concerns, they naturally bubble up from the relatively peaceful state, and our minds spend time working through our various concerns in a natural manner.
In today’s world, there are an incredible number of opportunities to distract us from addressing our concerns, from entertaining TV shows, movies, the ease of calling friends, and engaging on social media platforms. Methods that free us from so many distractions for periods of time can be enormously helpful in avoiding reaching what some have described as a nervous breakdown.
So, the six common characteristics of depression, melancholy, and anxiety I want to bring to your attention are, 1. the concern memory system serves as a warning sign, 2. we can delay attending to these warnings for a limited period of time, 3. when we put off dealing with our concerns, they don’t just go away, they come back again and again until they are adequately addressed, 4.despite our efforts at putting them off, as our concerns begin to accumulate without being fully addressed, it becomes harder to delay dealing with them, and our memory begins to remind us of them more frequently and more intensely, until we reach a point at which we must attend to them, like it or not, 5. people vary on how many and how serious their concerns must become before they no longer can divert their attention from their concerns, and 6. we can decrease the period of time before our concerns start to reach extremely frequent, strong, intense experiences by putting aside each day some time to reduce external distractions so we can more smoothly and comfortably address our concerns.
If we perceive a tiger rushing toward us, we would experience fear that would immediately fill up our concern bucket, and our attention would be completely on this event. During this time, you would not be thinking about what TV show you want to watch later that evening. Instead, your body would go into a state of flight or fight, your heart would be pounding, and adrenalin would begin to circulate in your blood, giving you added strength.
For example, observing a doctor coming toward you to give you an injection might produce just a mild degree of fear. At such time, you might decide to divert your attention to a pleasant image, and find you can do this.
For example, a woman might have plans to traverse a path in a jungle next week having heard that tigers have attacked people on that path. Each time she thinks about this, she is very likely to experience some fear.
After a hard day at work, Rob desires to get home so he can relax. As he is driving home, suddenly he hits a traffic jam, slowing his car almost to a stop. He initially experiences frustration. As he assesses the situation, he sees there is some road construction blocking one of the lanes. Then he sees that just up ahead, once cars pass the construction, traffic picks up to normal. This five-minute delay is no big deal, and his mind passes to some song playing on his radio.
Shanice desires to be viewed by her family as an excellent cook, and her family of four love that she takes charge of the evening meal. One day, as Shanice is working around her house, a concern arises within. She thinks to herself, “What should I make for supper?” When she can’t think of anything, she feels frustrated. Over the past few days, she has gone through her main classics, and now she doesn’t want to make something she views as “the same old, same old.”
Suddenly the phone rings, and because Shanice is in the midst of experiencing her frustration over this issue, she pauses before answering, thinking she wants to get her supper plans settled. But then she says, “I guess I could put this supper stuff off for a few minutes,” and she decides to answer her phone.
As Shanice flips through these recipes, her eyes fall upon one for sesame pasta. “Oh,” she says, “the last time I made this, everyone raved about it. I haven’t made it in a long time. I bet this might be a perfect choice, and she is now even more hopeful.”
Fred, an assistant manager in his firm, desires to get a promotion. When his annual review comes, it is excellent, and his hopes soar. One day the firms owner calls him into her office. He thinks to himself, “Maybe she’s going to tell me I’ve been promoted,” and once again his hope soars. Instead of a promotion, she fires Fred, explaining that the firm was just bought out by a big conglomerate, and they are bringing in their own personnel leadership.
During the walk, as he recalls moments of his firing and the loss of seeing his coworkers, powerful emotions arise within, and he sits on a park bench and begins to cry.
It’s a month later. He is grieving because he has received rejection letters from two of the nearby firms. He also finds that when he wakes up every morning he has a bout of anxiety, fearing the letter carrier will bring another rejection letter.
Here we see an example of someone experiencing, during a period of months, strong feelings of hope, frustration, anxiety, grief, fear, and happiness. There are times Fred has trouble concentrating on the usual family matters and community obligations. Still, many of the important tasks of life that don’t involve looking for a job manages to get done by Fred. But, at one point, he does excuse himself so he can eliminate distractions, fully experience his emotions, and formulate some plans.
Janet has just graduated from a Mental Health Counseling masters program. She now has thousands of dollars in college loans, but her husband makes just enough money so their living expenses are just barely being met.
To prepare for the test, she pays for a set of computer based instructions, which also provides practice tests. The cost to take the test, and the instructional material has really stretched her budget to the ultimate limit.
In this example, if Janet was asked to describe her emotional experience during this period of her life, she may very well say that she was mainly feeling a great deal of anxiety. The combined fear of failing her test, having to take the test over, maybe failing it again, having a miscarriage or having a baby with serious medical problems, we can imagine, could have overshadowed her other emotions.
To understand the nature of anxiety, we must understand how it is related to four other emotional experiences. The above four examples seeks to help us see these relationships.
Now, when we have frustration along with grieving experiences or anxiety, many of us begin to insult ourselves. We might say, things like, “Why am I acting like a baby,” “I’m acting crazy,” “What an idiot I am,” “I’m mentally ill,” “I’m hopeless and helpless,” “This is a horrible experience, and it’s all my fault,” “I hate myself,” “I deserve to die,” etc. Those who go to war with themselves in this manner, add a whole additional serious concern to what they are already facing because people have an inherent desire to respect themselves. Creating the impression with these insulting attitudes that they are not worthy of respect frustrates this desire.
So, here we see two alternative experiences, one in which frustration and grieving gets mixed together with insulting, and one in which frustration and anxiety gets mixed together with insulting. When we experience frustration and grieving, and are also insulting ourselves, we might want to refer to this as depression.
As I pointed out in my post titled, “Depression and Melancholy,” melancholy offers us a third alternative.
Consider how musician and song writer Joni Mitchell described melancholy in her beautiful song, “Hijira.”
In melancholy, the person practices self-compassion and views the experiences of frustration, grieving, and anxiety as a natural helpful process we all must go through from time to time. Melancholy provides a richer, and more powerful approach for addressing our concerns, even the most challenging ones. It doesn’t waste time with all of the insults, though, because of old habits, some may still leap into consciousness. When they do, individuals in a melancholy state of being can observe them without believing they are true. Rather, they recognize them as old unhelpful habits, allow themselves to experience the physical sensations that come with them, and then, when those sensations pass in their own good time, they move on to other work that needs to be done.
TV shows, movies, and politics portray people constantly blaming others in a hateful manner for all the problems that they see in the world. So, this style of dealing even with our own concerns is something that we pick up like mud on our shoes after strolling through an unpaved path after a storm.
Additionally, my three novels provide an entertaining way to learn to develop self respect (see 
A central difference between the two has to do with throwing insults at ourselves; when we are depressed we spend a great deal of time doing that, in melancholy, not so much. To better understand what I mean by this, and to clarify the natural function of depression and melancholy, it will be worthwhile to first take a brief look at another state of being, sleep.
As a result of our special familiarity with sleep–we experience it pretty much every single day–when I point out six of its characteristics, everyone will readily know what I’m talking about. It will then be easier to see that similar characteristics occur with the less familiar depression and melancholy experiences.
Before we go to sleep, we experience a warning that sleep is heading our way. We refer to this warning as “feeling sleepy.”
Feeling sleepy can range from being a little sleepy, all the way to the point where we can barely keep our eyes open. This range of sleepiness is dependent on a special memory that stores how sleepy you are. This memory can be visualized as a bucket. If you are a little sleepy in the morning, the bucket is viewed as only slightly filled. If you manage to divert your attention from the sleepiness so you can go to work, by the time you get back home, your sleepiness memory hasn’t forgotten that the bucket was slightly filled earlier, and now that several more hours have gone by without getting some sleep, the bucket has filled up beyond the height than it was in the morning. 
This becomes noticeable by more frequent waves of sleepiness, and each wave feels more heavy or intense. If you divert your attention from how sleepy you are so you can have dinner and watch a few of your favorite TV shows, you will find that none of your earlier sleepiness has been completely forgotten for long, and on top of that, even more sleepiness has been added. 
Finally, some people, desiring to avoid having their bucket getting filled up too early, will carve out some time in their day to take a nap or two. Each nap lowers the level in their bucket, and they therefore remain more alert during the day after a few minutes of grogginess passes.
As Katrina is on her way to work, a concern arises within. “My job is not really right for me,” she says to herself. “It’s getting more and more boring, and the pay is barely enough to make ends meet. I have to make a change.”
Upon arriving home, Katrina puts on the TV to see some shows she likes. While watching, she finds that her concerns intrude into her consciousness more frequently and in a more intense manner than previous recent days. In the medical model of thinking about this, these intrusions would be viewed as symptoms of a possible mental disorder. As I view them, they are as natural as a sunrise.
Meditation is supremely useful for this because the practice involves going to a quiet place and then closing your eyes. Although during meditation you may spend some time focussing on your mantra, this mantra task is so simple that ample time and mental space is available for your concerns to bubble up to the surface where they can be addressed while you are in a relatively calm state.
In today’s world, because there are so many opportunities to distract us from addressing our concerns, from entertaining TV shows, movies, the ease of calling friends, and engaging on social media platforms, methods that free us from so many distractions for periods of time can be enormously helpful.
We have just looked at six characteristics of depression that are somewhat similar to the six characteristics of sleep that we discussed earlier in this essay. There are, of course, some differences between sleep and depression. The difference I want to point out here is that the passing of time is the main factor that leads to needing to go into a period of sleep. The longer you are awake, the sleepier you are likely to become.
Some concerns are relatively easy to address, others are harder. Moreover, concerns vary with regards to how threatening they are to one’s goals.
The six characteristics that apply to depression apply to melancholy as well. The chief difference between the two, as I mentioned earlier, is when people experience depression they insult themselves, whereas when people experience melancholy, not so much.
All of this leads to the person experiencing self-loathing. The insults people attack themselves with add to the concerns in their bucket, leading to it becoming fuller more quickly than if they did not do this, and the insults are distracting, so that the real work of addressing the real concerns are less efficiently addressed.
Despair takes us in when we have no where else to go; when we feel the heart cannot break anymore, when our world or our loved ones disappear, when we feel we cannot be loved or do not deserve to be loved, when our God disappoints, or when our body is carrying profound pain in a way that does not go away.
Despair is a necessary and seasonal state of repair, a temporary healing absence, an internal physiological and psychological winter when our previous forms of participation in the world take a rest; it is a loss of horizon, it is the place we go when we do not want to be found in the same way anymore. We give up hope and certain particular wishes are no longer able to come true and despair is the time in which we both endure and heal, even when we have not yet found the new form of hope.
Melancholy provides a richer, and more powerful approach for addressing our concerns, even the most challenging ones. It doesn’t waste time with all of the insults, though, because of old habits, some may still leap into consciousness. When they do, those in melancholy can observe them without believing they are true. Rather, they recognize them as old unhelpful habits, allow themselves to experience the physical sensations that come with them, and then, when those sensations pass in their own good time, they move on to other work that needs to be done.
In our society, many of us learn to address our concerns using the depression pattern. How can they change that pattern so, when the bucket is full they experience, instead, melancholy?