The pleasure of being sad

Have you ever felt sad when a friend moved away, or when a pet died, or when things don’t go as planned? Have you ever lost your interest in activities you once enjoyed? We may be of a sizeable height, holding down many admirable achievements and capable of making impressive speeches, but where it counts in our resilience to emotional chaos, we are no robust than a very young infant. Well, ‘sadness’ is actually a part of human experience, which is often thought of as the natural reaction to a downhearted situation. There have been many arguments over what exactly it is and what, if anything, to do about it.

Whenever we sense our spirits sinking, and folly and anxiety pressing in on us, many of us try to abandon ourselves rather than seeking for assistance of another. It may look as if we are trying to fight our own demons. In fact, we need to annihilate them with the help of others where possible. When a friend says that he/she is sad; you often respond by asking, “what happened?”; presuming that sadness has an external cause outside the self. This is a relatively new idea. The ancient Greeks believed it was caused by a dark fluid inside the body. ‘Melancholia’ comes from the word melaina-kholé (black bile) - the humor believed to cause sadness. However, these Greek ideas resonate with current views; not on the sadness we feel every now and then, but on clinical depression. Doctors believe that certain kinds of long-term, unexplained emotional states are at least somewhat related to brain chemistry. Alterations in the balance of these chemicals impact greatly on how we respond to even extremely difficult circumstances.

‘Melancholy’ is an underused word, which isn’t exactly on everybody’s lips. It has been assigned with a number of names including: melancholia, psychotic depression, typical depression, endogenous depression, autonomous depression and core depression. Melancholia -- a subtype of depression – often makes people suffer with extreme despair and guilt. They may struggle to feel cheerfulness, even when good things happen in their lives. Melancholic depression is more likely to occur in individuals who are having a severe major depressive episode or a history of trauma.

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), we can see that what we're really speaking of is a specifier named with “melancholic features”, which can be assigned to many different disorders including major depressive disorder, persistent depressive disorder and bipolar disorder. These mental health issues will disturb your day-to-day routines by causing loss of pleasure in almost all activities, lack of reactivity to stimuli that would usually be pleasurable, a depressed mood characterized by profound despondency or despair, depression that becomes worse in the morning, early morning awakening, marked psychomotor agitation or retardation, significant weight loss or anorexia, and inappropriate or excessive guilt. Outside of what we see within the symptomatic criteria, there may be other specific characteristics related to melancholic depression as well.

A lot of decent people have a really hard time being depressed, as it is becoming unusually difficult to live comfortably with those we love, with a career that is both financially rewarding and morally uplifting. Yet, no one ever will overcome these battles or attain inner peace unless they find the pleasure of being melancholic. Even though the modern society tends to esteem high spirits and cheerfulness, we have to admit that reality is, for the most part, about grief and loss. A good life is not one which is clear of any sadness, but one in which its hardships contribute to our development. As a matter of fact, melancholy is not a disorder that needs to be cured. It is about perceiving without indignation the fact that the world is full of folly and greed; which is necessary in gaining wisdom. As Bill Murray once said, "Melancholy is kind of sweet sometimes. It's not a negative thing. It's not a mean thing. It's just something that happens in life, like autumn."

Dinithi Wickramathilaka | 17 Batch