In praise of non-happiness

I have written a little about this, and have talked about this quite a bit with friends, but I personally believe that depression has an important role to play in our lives and that holding up "perma-happy" as the ultimate state-of-mind to be in is a mistake modern society is increasingly making.

Periods of non-happiness, periods of mild depression, seem to be periods in which people stop to take stock of things, ask themselves important questions (even if it is to ask questions that have no real answers), reconsider things like partner, choice of career, health, diet, leisure, family and friends. Things that are not that unimportant in the grander scheme of things : )

But society is hostile to depression or any form of non-happiness basically, telling us in many shapes and forms to 'snap back', 'stop dwelling', 'buckle up', 'think positive', 'take a pill', 'get out', 'get laid', 'get a grip', 'get help', etc.

Recently a friend-acquaintance of mine was looking a bit down. I gave him my spiel on how I felt happiness was overrated and 'the blues' were underrated. That if he was going through a tough time that is was important, the he must be at a transition point, that it must be the right time to take stock of things and decide what is important for him and, basically, that a mild depression was not only normal but would probably turn out to be very useful. Another friend who was there reacted to my words was truly surprised to hear my words. With a lot of female intelligence, she added yes, it is normal, but pointed out  that wallowing in his blues would not do much good and that asking questions without answers could put him into a dark spiral. At first, the friend in question asked us if it was really that apparent that he wasn't 'feeling 100%' and then he smiled weakly and admitted that he was trying to deal with quite a bit including the "fact" that you can't really let on to others that you aren't doing that well (especially since he works in the service industry) which is why he was trying to hide it.

While I do realize that in extreme cases depression can become severe and lead to dangerous behavior and even suicide, but I can't help to think that, except in those cases, people can be helped if we as a society except non-happiness as normal and even useful.

An interesting sidenote to all this, and the article that sparked my blog entry comes from The Economist magazine. Here is an excerpt from that article: 

Depression may be linked to how willing someone is to give up his goals

CLINICAL depression is a serious ailment, but almost everyone gets mildly depressed from time to time. Randolph Nesse, a psychologist and researcher in evolutionary medicine at the University of Michigan, likens the relationship between mild and clinical depression to the one between normal and chronic pain. He sees both pain and low mood as warning mechanisms and thinks that, just as understanding chronic pain means first understanding normal pain, so understanding clinical depression means understanding mild depression.

Dr Nesse’s hypothesis is that, as pain stops you doing damaging physical things, so low mood stops you doing damaging mental ones—in particular, pursuing unreachable goals. Pursuing such goals is a waste of energy and resources. Therefore, he argues, there is likely to be an evolved mechanism that identifies certain goals as unattainable and inhibits their pursuit—and he believes that low mood is at least part of that mechanism.

It is a neat hypothesis, but is it true? A study published in this month’s issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests it might be. Carsten Wrosch from Concordia University in Montreal and Gregory Miller of the University of British Columbia studied depression in teenage girls. They measured the “goal adjustment capacities” of 97 girls aged 15-19 over the course of 19 months. They asked the participants questions about their ability to disengage from unattainable goals and to re-engage with new goals. They also asked about a range of symptoms associated with depression, and tracked how these changed over the course of the study.

Their conclusion was that those who experienced mild depressive symptoms  could, indeed, disengage more easily from unreachable goals. That supports Dr Nesse’s hypothesis. But the new study also found a remarkable corollary: those women who could disengage from the unattainable proved less likely to suffer more serious depression in the long run.

Mild depressive symptoms can therefore be seen as a natural part of dealing with failure in young adulthood. They set in when a goal is identified as unreachable and lead to a decline in motivation. In this period of low motivation, energy is saved and new goals can be found. If this mechanism does not function properly, though, severe depression can be the consequence. 

While the article deals with teenagers, I can't help to believe that something similar is going on with adults. The kind of crises people have at 30, 40, 50 and 60, in which oddly enough adults start to act a bit like adolescents, seem similar - people 'take advantage' of these so-called crises to stop and dwell on the circumstances of their lives, to reconsider dreams (if they are attainable, if they have slipped away, if it is 'now or never', if they have to be redefined or let go of, ...) and to reevaluate goals.

So the next time someone we know seems a bit down in the dumps, let's be supportive and make our own little contribution in the name of praise for the valuable and often spiritual growth that non-happiness can bring into our lives.