Sit with it

We have medicalized sadness.

 Feeling sad is unpleasant and uncomfortable and—I will use this word ironically here—depressing. We don’t want to feel bad. Of course we don’t. And we don’t have to! There’s a pill for that. Many pills. There’s Zoloft and Prozac and Paxil. There’s Celexa, Lexapro, Cymbalta. Antidepressants are either the third or fourth most prescribed class of drugs in the US, with opioids, hypertensives and statins edging them out. The number of prescriptions written for antidepressants has increased more than 350 percent in the past 25 years. (The magnitude of change is the same even after accounting for population growth.).

 Why? Yes, I know, we’ve been living through tough times. Shit happens, and we feel really unhappy about it. But people before us lived through tougher times. Maybe one difference that accounts for at least some of this extraordinary spike in antidepressant use is this: We have medicalized sadness. Just as we have medicalized birth, death, and everything in between.

 I am not saying there is no room for, no call for—even an urgent call for—medical intervention. Sometimes. After a 42-hour labor and 2 hours of attempting to push a big-headed, 10-pound, 7-ounce baby out of a 10-centimeter opening in my body, you can BET I believe in medical intervention. Either Jackson or I, or possibly both of us, would not be here without medical intervention.

 What I am saying is that we are swimming/drowning in a buy-this-to-solve-a-problem culture that is encouraged and abetted by a monstrous pharmaceutical industry. We have learned, our culture has taught us, to avoid discomfort as quickly as we can, to medicate our way out of discomfort.  

 But sadness is a normal and natural emotion. It is usually triggered by specific events: an illness, the death of someone close to us, an unwanted change, a disappointment, a failure. In other words: life. Sadness is not a mental disorder. (And yes, I do understand that depression is a real thing. And I do respect that some need to seek treatment.)

 However, we’ve confused or conflated the two. We’ve come to see and define sadness as depression, as a mental health disorder we can pill-pop away. It isn’t.

Sadness is a lesson to be learned from. You don’t chase it away. You sit with it.