http://www.newswI have to make up a case here. While happiness must not be a ending in itself, likely money, it is highly desirable and even vital to human being. A certain level of happiness, must be said. If you, sadness defendant, give yourself the work to review the books out there you'll find that you are generalizing. I've lost my father four year ago, since there I met hell. I was wondering if I was condemned to spend the rest of my life as a dull boy, without any joy or meaning, that is what I felt. With that I lost relationships (because people don't wanna live with sad others), money (in binge action), jobs (I felt so discontent that I was extremely non-productive) and gain lots of fat (I would go binge eating to try to feel some relief). So I discovered the studies behind Positive Psychology and it literally give me the tools to build strength and a holly new perception of the world and of the problems, including the wrong way I was dealing with grief. My father died from severe major depression. I had it following his death. From this point of view I can assure: to understand depression you MUST firs have the experience to live near to someone who has and after you must experience it yourself. This way you can understand what depression really is. I used to think my father was weak and things like that, and I thank that way until he died. So, just now, I know what to be really depressive feel like. I've read: Authentic Happiness, Learned Optimism (both from M. Seligman), Women who Think So Much (from Nolen-Hoeksema) and Flow (from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi). Further I read lots of master and doctorate thesis I found on the internet, things regarding learned helplessness, flow, rumination (specially a piece from Nolen-Hoeksema with Barbara Fredrickson called "Rethinking Rumination"). Neither of this literature suggested me to be a 90 or 100% happy person. I found so much suggestions to use pessimism, or realism, wherever necessary. Even there are suggestions on how to evaluate each situation so oneself can decide. I also suggest the reading of Daniel Gilbert's as a counter-balance and food for tough. I'm 30, from Brazil, almost lost my life to sadness and I'm here to assure: Happiness, with moderation and responsibility, have the power to change one's life!
Happiness: Enough Already
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Yet by these criteria, any number of reactions to devastating events qualify as pathological. Such as? For three weeks a woman feels sad and empty, unable to generate any interest in her job or usual activities, after her lover of five years breaks off their relationship; she has little appetite, lies awake at night and cannot concentrate during the day. Or a man's only daughter is suffering from a potentially fatal blood disorder; for weeks he is consumed by despair, cannot sleep or concentrate, feels tired and uninterested in his usual activities.
Horwitz and Wakefield do not contend that the spurned lover or the tormented father should be left to suffer. Both deserve, and would likely benefit from, empathic counseling. But their symptoms "are neither abnormal nor inappropriate in light of their" situations, the authors write. The DSM definition of depression "mistakenly encompasses some normal emotional reactions," due to its failure to take into account the context or trigger for sadness.
That has consequences. When someone is appropriately sad, friends and colleagues offer support and sympathy. But by labeling appropriate sadness pathological, "we have attached a stigma to being sad," says Wakefield, "with the result that depression tends to elicit hostility and rejection" with an undercurrent of " 'Get over it; take a pill.' The normal range of human emotion is not being tolerated." And insisting that sadness requires treatment may interfere with the natural healing process. "We don't know how drugs react with normal sadness and its functions, such as reconstituting your life out of the pain," says Wakefield.
Even the psychiatrist who oversaw the current DSM expresses doubts about the medicalizing of sadness. "To be human means to naturally react with feelings of sadness to negative events in one's life," writes Robert Spitzer of the New York State Psychiatric Institute in a foreword to "The Loss of Sadness." That would be unremarkable if it didn't run completely counter to the message of the happiness brigades. It would be foolish to underestimate the power and tenacity of the happiness cheerleaders. But maybe, just maybe, the single-minded pursuit of happiness as an end in itself, rather than as a consequence of a meaningful life, has finally run its course.
© 2008
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