A Better Way To Deal With Sadness

In Love Among the Ruins, a novel set in the aftermath of the Kennedy era, Robert Clark depicts a conversation between Edward, a pharmaceuticals representative, and a favorite client, Dr. Fields. They are talking about a highly promising new drug for treating depression. "I think that's the coming thing…," the wise old doctor says. "Stress followed by despair…feeings of worthlessness, torpor, anomie, flat-out nothingness." Edward then asks, "So the Age of…what, Anxiety's over?" Dr. Fields replies, "Superceded. At least some time soon. By the Age of Black Bile, of Acedia…spiritual sloth…despair."

Dr. Fields was prophetic. For the first half of the 20^th century --- as poets, philosophers, psychoanalysts, and even politicians all knew well --- the big life-issues revolved around coping with a cascade of fears. Sexual repression, wars (hot and cold), economic collapse, genocide, and a nuclear arms race will do that to you. And the Age of Anxiety isn't completely over. Enron, WorldCom, orange alerts, ineffective antibiotics, and duct tape shortages are making sure. "Superceded," though? A good way of putting it. The "coming thing" has indeed come, and dwelling just on our fears won't help us very much to cope with it.

The signs? For one thing, the failed hopes that underlie collapsed marriages. Our country enjoys the dubious honor of sustaining one of the highest divorce rates in the history of civilization; some experts say it's the highest. For another, the rising tide of suicide among kids in their teens and even younger. And then there's all that cacophony that attempts to pass for music, pounding the last vestiges of sensibility and understanding out of traumatized ears and brains. Not enough? Then, add the desperate efforts to escape despair that are at the root of our society's alcohol and drug problems, as well as of our impossible-to-win "War on Drugs." (Maybe we shouldn't get too distraught over the latter; after all, we didn't win the war on poverty either.)

What Bunyan famously referred to as "the slough of despond," Dr. Fields might have described as a deep and abiding sadness over losses too numerous to enumerate, too important to discount, and too searing fully to heal. For this kind of sadness, it will make little difference whether the relief sought comes from bars, the street, or chem labs. And this is what is really sad about sadness: how easy it is to confuse curing it with medicating it.

A great deal of human sadness, rooted in what Judith Viorst once called "necessary losses," is in fact curable in very ordinary ways. For the losses that give rise to it are themselves very ordinary, even if painful, losses. They have to do with basic human needs, e.g., for food, clothing, shelter, companionship, emotional support, and credible reassurance that things can and do get better. Mapping how to get these needs met is not like mapping the genome. What we do, to get enough of what we need, or recover enough of what we have lost, is put up a fuss (hungry newborns are especially adept at this), and work together to overcome our mutual frustrations (newborns are not very good at this, which is why it is a good thing to grow up.)

It is hard to get through life without at least some sadness, because putting up a fuss sometimes falls on deaf ears, or merely provokes whoever we hope will help us to put up a fuss of their own. This is the kind of sadness that Freud called "ordinary human unhappiness" (in contrast with "neurotic misery"). I like this way of putting it, and I imagine that Dr. Fields did too. When the frustrations go deep enough, and last long enough, medicating the sadness might help temporarily. Sooner or later, though, we will still have to summon the resources within us to get angry again, to be hopeful that help is available, and to make ourselves available to be of help to someone else. Caring about ourselves and others is still the best Rx for sadness around.

There is a kind of sadness, though, that is hard to treat this way. Medicating it doesn't work very well either. It's the sadness that comes from discovering the aw(e)ful gap between our aspirations and our accomplishments, our noble ideals and our petulant actions, our promises and our delivery --- between what we ought to make so, can make so, and actually do make so. Here's something really to be sad about. We will never get through this particular slough just by howling, snorting, sipping, or doing-for. The only thing that will really help is forgiveness.