I worry that we have killed sadness.
Maybe I just worry that we think we have killed sadness.
Let me explain what I mean.
It seems that everywhere you look, depression is up today. In fact, while preparing to write this post, I googled if numbers were up and the very first link had the headline, “U.S. Depression Rate Remains Historically High.” You can read that article here, and you can find my other results by clicking on this link.
On one hand, I should be ecstatic about this research. We’re finally seeing attention being given to mental health. Real conversations are happening every day between everyday people about emotions and mental health.
On the other hand, these results bother me.
They keep me up at night.
I ponder them when I’m driving.
I ruminate on them when I’m sitting in a tree stand.
I discuss them with my wife, who is also a therapist.
My children and I chew on them like a dog chews on a piece of leather.
Why?
Why, at a time when we are spending more money, more energy, and more resources on mental health, are the numbers so dismal?
There is no shortage of simple answers offered.
Some people tell me it’s because of who our President is.
But the numbers didn’t improve when it wasn’t him.
Some people tell me it’s because of our parents.
The economy gets more than a few nods from people.
There are a lot of factors offered.
Ironically, these simple answers all probably have some element of truth to them because the problem is quite complex.
I wonder if it isn’t because we’ve killed sadness.
As a therapist, I see a lot of people who tell me they were depressed “over the weekend.”
Sometimes, they tell me they were depressed “this morning.”
I think what they mean is that they had depressive symptoms.
What they mean is that they were sad during those times.
There was a time when depression meant you had symptoms for a prolonged period of time.
Today, it’s two weeks.
And it’s almost always a self-report method. Self-report is often unreliable.
What does this have to do with killing sadness?
It seems to me, we no longer have a place for sadness in our world.
And this is important because it’s our beliefs that primarily form our expectations, and those form our world.
Albert Ellis, the founder of Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT), believed that it’s not the things that happened to us that create our emotions.
When I share this with clients, they often respond with a great deal of confusion.
Ellis taught it’s what we believe about what happened that creates our emotions.
If that’s true, and I believe it is, there are two important takeaways:
1. What you believe about your experiences is more important than the experiences themselves.
2. We can change our emotional responses by examining and changing our expectations (when necessary) and our beliefs about situations.
Kelly McConigal is a professional health psychologist. She travels the world telling people that stress isn’t actually bad for you! She states it’s your belief that makes stress bad for you. She suggests that if you believe stress is good for you, your health improves.
In her TED talk, which can be found here, the audience laughs when she first presents this idea.
And then, her research takes over.
By the end, no one is laughing.
And yet, the message seems to be lost under the deluge of information that says stress is indeed bad for you, regardless of what you believe about stress.
Seriously, I cannot encourage you strongly enough to go watch her talk.
In our society today, we seem to have a belief that being sad is bad.
It’s so bad that if we experience anything more than fleeting sadness, we have depression.
We make some allowances for when our local football team loses Friday night.
Or if our favorite professional sports team doesn’t do what we hoped.
We allow our kids to have some momentary sadness if their boyfriend or girlfriend breaks up with them.
But if that sadness makes it to the morning, then we seem to believe that they must be depressed.
If our own sadness makes it to more than an arbitrary number of hours, we assume we are depressed.
If we’re sad Friday to Monday, we believe we were depressed those days.
Wake up not feeling sad on Tuesday? We’re no longer depressed.
For most people, that’s settled science.
But what if it’s wrong?
What if it’s bad science?
What if that’s what is driving the historically high rates of depression?
Why do we think sad is bad?
What if sad is just a normal part of life?
What if sad is just a regular emotion?
I believe it is.
I think anyone who is going to find meaning in life is going to risk, and risk is inevitably going to lead to difficult times and even loss.
Sadness is sure to follow like morning follows the night.
And I can’t help but wonder what might happen if we decided that was not only OK but good for us.
Because when we constantly chase the euphoric rush of constant happiness, we diminish our ability to find true meaning.
True meaning is on the other side of risk and distress.
But because we believe that sad is bad, we ruthlessly work to eliminate risk and distress from our lives.
Everything in life is organized around this principle, from our churches to how we do medicine.
Don’t believe me? Find the “cool” church in your town and visit if you don’t already attend—or are a member, because you too want to be cool.
How much comfort is built into the whole service?
The music is chosen because of how good it makes people feel about themselves.
Good coffee—ok, at least mediocre coffee—is given away for free. Why? So people feel good; they don’t have to rush on their way to church to get coffee, they can just get it there.
Everything from the front doors to the sermon preached is crafted for comfort.
I’m not saying those things are bad, but they do speak to a greater societal obsession with comfort.
The way we consume our food? Oriented around our comfort.
Let’s talk about how we do mental health diagnoses.
You’ve probably noticed for a while now, when you go to your regular doctor (PCP), you answer some questions about how you’ve been feeling for the last two weeks.
Even if you’re going for something like a cold or bad allergies.
This makes some sense, as we know mental health can influence our physical health.
Often, what happens is you are given some version of what is known as GAD-7 or PHQ-9, both of which are tools designed to help diagnose anxiety and depression. You can find a GAD-7 here and a PHQ-9 here.
As part of my training, I am authorized to use these devices, and I have used them in my work as a private practice mental health therapist.
They’re tools.
Like any tool, they have benefits and drawbacks.
To me, the biggest drawback is the impact they have had on our understanding of sadness, depression, and mental health.
I’m old enough to remember when diagnostic criteria involved a prolonged amount of time. Some were taught that a person wasn’t in depression if they hadn’t been experiencing symptoms for less than six months.
I can hear the gasps escaping some readers’ mouths as I write those words, and they haven’t even read them yet.
“Why should someone have to suffer that long?”
Well, how long does it take to titrate off of most anxiety or anti-depression medicine? You should look that up. I wonder if the symptoms should exist at least that long before we diagnose someone.
Now, our most common diagnostic tools examine the last two weeks of your life (at most).
I can’t help but wonder how that has affected our beliefs about mental health and life. How has it changed our mental health?
I’d like to go one step further—what would happen if we changed our expectations around sadness?
I hate this phrase, but what if we normalized being sad for longer than a few short hours?
What if we changed our view that sad is bad?
What if sadness is just a normal part of living?
I can’t help but wonder if our overall mental health would improve if that change happened.