The Logic of Sadness and Its Near Allies: Depression, Melancholy and Boredom

Abstract

Recently there has been an interesting dialogue about ‘misrepresenting normal suffering as an illness’ and turning sorrow into sickness.¹ In the context of suffering, to reflect on life and give meaning to it, and even embrace it, is the path of generating insight and discernment about life and death according to the Buddha, as he explained the first noble truth in his first sermon, ‘Setting the Wheel in Motion’. The ground-breaking work, The Loss of Sadness, by Horowitz and Wakefield, says that there is a danger that normal sadness is being converted into a mental disorder:

Sadness is an inherent part of the human condition, not a mental disorder. Thus to confront psychiatry’s invalid definition of depressive disorder is also to consider a painful but an important part of our humanity that we have tended to shut aside in the modern medicalization of human problems. As science allows us to gain more control over our emotional states, we will inevitably confront the question of whether normal intense sadness has any redeeming features or should be banished from our lives. Such a momentous scientific and moral issue should not be spuriously resolved by using a semantic confusion in the DSM that mistakenly places states of intense sadness under the medical category of disorder. We can only adequately confront the complex and important concerns involved if we clearly differentiate normal sadness from mental disorder.²