Healthy Skepticism Library item: 12989
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Publication type: news
Kirkey S.
Sadness can be creative, author says: Don't worry, be unhappy
Ottawa Citizen 2008 Feb 17
http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/story.html?id=f08a6ba3-9391-42d5-9a7e-2d9f3f955d7b
Full text:
The Book
Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy
By Eric Wilson
Eric Wilson says we’re on a path toward a “cosmos of total contentment,” a world where every single one of us one day will be happy.
And that makes him very afraid.
The author of the controversial new book Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy believes many people have been duped by the craze for happiness, from the plethora of self-help books offering 10-step programs on how to be happier, to the vast increase in the prescribing of psychiatric medications.
Regardless of how happy people profess to be, Wilson believes everyone struggles with “this tension between our own dark feelings and the grating call of the bright, shiny, happy world,” and that we feel guilty for it.
The professor of English at North Carolina’s Wake Forest University isn’t romanticizing clinical depression or the “lost souls” who need serious medications to keep them from harming themselves or others.
He’s also not a scientist, a psychiatrist or a psychotherapist. He is, he says, a literary humanist who believes the over-emphasis on happiness is leading to a kind of “bland, attenuated life,” where people stuff normal bouts of blues and melancholy and sadness behind painted grins, and where anyone who’s feeling a bit off-kilter “can take Paxil or Prozac and in a few days enjoy an unreal gratification, the two-beer buzz of canned bliss.”
Sadness, Wilson says, is being treated as a sickness in our culture, a “weakness of will” that needs to be fixed with a pill.
“I’m not against happiness in general,” Wilson says. “I’m not saying people should wallow in sadness. But you should not be afraid to sit with your sadness and see what grows out of it.”
Wilson, who says he was born to the blues and who, as a teen, felt “most myself” lolling in his darkened bedroom reading Kafka and listening to John Lennon, says melancholy can lead to self-revelations and new ideas, and that “creative, irrational eruptions of melancholy or sadness” can be life-changing.
His book offers a list of “melancholy innovators,” from van Gogh and Beethoven to Bruce Springsteen.
“We know people who go through life who say everything is good and great, no matter what we ask them about their well-being or health. ‘I’m great!’ ‘I’m good!’ ‘I’m fine!’ That kind of predictable response,” Wilson says.
He quotes a recent poll in which 85 per cent of Americans surveyed said they are very happy, or at least happy, but Wilson asks how all this gleefulness can be for real, given not just the eroding ozone and other global issues, but maxed-out credit, spousal spats and other “particular irritations that bedevil our everyday existence.”
Wilson has been accused of being insensitive and “Hamlet-mad for sadness,” but he’s not the only one worried about the push to anesthetize not just sadness but other ordinary human experiences.
According to prescription-drug-tracking firm IMS Health Canada, more than 30.2 million prescriptions for antidepressants were filled by Canadian retail drug stores in the 12-month period ending Nov. 30, 2007 — up from 20 million prescriptions dispensed in 2002.
Critics say antidepressants and even antipsychotics once reserved for the sickest patients are increasingly being prescribed to children and to adults with any emotion that seems to be the slightest bit off the norm.
Gail Hornstein, a scholar who studies mental illness, says people’s emotions are being chemically managed to the point “they never feel very happy and never feel very sad.” It’s what psychiatrists used to call, in a derogatory or pathologizing way, the “flat affect.”
“The idea of turning it into something we ought to strive for, I think, is very, very problematic,” says Hornstein, professor of psychology at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts.
“Of course its distressing to feel sadness and grief, no one would wish that. It would be great if we could feel happy all the time.
“But life is not like that, and to pretend that we should feel happy all the time is very distressing, because when actual things happen to people for which they feel sad, they won’t know how to cope.”
Clinical psychologist Nancy O’Reilly says self-help books can guilt people into thinking, ‘I’m just not happy enough,’ or ‘I’m not joyful enough.’
“The sense is, if I’m not happy every day maybe I’ve got a dysfunction,” says O’Reilly, founder of WomenSpeak.com, an online resource for women, and host of a weekly radio program on Voice America called Courageous WomenSpeak.
Throughout history, societies have defined what it means to be happy, and too often today, being “happy” means being thin and well-exercised, says Jennifer Hecht, author of the Happiness Myth: The Historical Antidote to What Isn’t Working Today. “I know people who make themselves happy every day by not exercising and having a cookie.”
She says the advice to live life as if every day will be your last ignores the “good day happiness,” the forgettable stuff that makes people happy — a cup of tea, or beers and a movie.
