BYR Achieve · 镜像论坛

Is it really bad to be sad? 悲伤情绪真的一无是处么？ 14 January 2009 by Jessica Marshall New Scientist -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WHY be miserable? OK, so it's January and you're feeling fat and broke after the excesses of the holiday season, but there's really no need. Misery is inconvenient, unpleasant, and in a society where personal happiness is prized above all else, there is little tolerance for wallowing in despair. Especially now we've got drugs for it. 为什么要悲伤？好，现在是一月份，经过假期的折腾之后，你觉得自己在发胖在崩溃，但这真的没有必要悲伤。悲伤给人带来不适，悲伤使人沮丧。在这样一个“个人幸福大过天”的社会里，我们无法容忍绝望里的纠结。特别是，我们现在已经有了针对这个的药物。 Antidepressants can help banish sad feelings - not just the life-sapping black dog of clinical depression, but the rough patches that most people go through sometimes, whether it's after losing a job, the break-up of a relationship or the death of a loved one. So it's no surprise that more and more people are taking them . 抗抑郁药物有助于消除悲伤的感觉，削弱临床抑郁症中的沮丧感——不仅仅是指整个人生的悲哀，也指的是在特定的时间里人们索经历的坎坷，无论是失业、了结某段关系，还是至爱的离世。所以，越来越多的人在服用抗抑郁药物，这也就没什么好奇怪了。 But is this really such a good idea? A growing number of cautionary voices from the world of mental health research are saying it isn't. They fear that the increasing tendency to treat normal sadness as if it were a disease is playing fast and loose with a crucial part of our biology. Sadness, they argue, serves an evolutionary purpose - and if we lose it, we lose out. 但这真的是个好办法么？世界各地越来越多的心理研究表明，这并非是个好主意。研究者担忧，这种逐渐兴起的、将普通的悲伤情绪当作疾病来治疗的趋势，会加速我们的生物有机体的运行，并使之瓦解。他们认为，悲伤是具有进化论意义的。如果我们失去了悲伤，那我们就失去了全部。 "When you find something this deeply in us biologically, you presume that it was selected because it had some advantage, otherwise we wouldn't have been burdened with it," says Jerome Wakefield, a clinical social worker at New York University and co-author of The Loss of Sadness: How psychiatry transformed normal sorrow into depressive disorder (with Allan Horwitz, Oxford University Press, 2007). "We're fooling around with part of our biological make-up." “当你发现一些植根于我们生物本性的东西的时候，你会认为它是经过自然选择的。因为，如果它是无益的，我们就没有必要一直负载着它”，杰罗姆·韦克菲尔德这样说到。他是纽约大学的临床社会学家，他曾经以合作作者的身份与艾伦·霍维兹（美国新泽西州大学社会和行为科学家。译者注）发表论文《悲伤的逝去：精神病学是如何将普通的伤感转化为失控的抑郁症》，该论文由牛津大学出版社于2007年出版。杰罗姆还认为，我们正在为生物体的一部分表象所迷惑。 Perhaps, then, it is time to embrace our miserable side. Yet many psychiatrists insist not. Sadness has a nasty habit of turning into depression, they warn. Even when people are sad for good reason, they should be allowed to take drugs to make themselves feel better if that's what they want. 我们都有悲伤的一面，也许现在到了该接受这个的时候，尽管许多精神科医生坚定地予以否认。他们警告说，悲伤具有转化为抑郁的消极趋势。即使当人们是喜极而泣的时候，如果他们想让自己变得高兴起来，那么也应该允许他们服用药物。 So who is right? Is sadness something we can live without or is it a crucial part of the human condition? 那么，谁是正确的？悲伤到底是我们生活中不必要的东西，还是人类生存的关键条件？ Hard evidence for the importance of sadness in humans is difficult to come by, but there are lots of ideas about why our propensity to feel sad might have evolved. It may be a self-protection strategy, as it seems to be among other primates that show signs of sadness. An ape that doesn't obviously slink off after it loses status may be seen as continuing to challenge the dominant ape - and that could be fatal. 悲伤对于人类是很重要的，虽然对此很难找出确凿的证据。但是，关于我们为什么会倾向于感受悲伤，很多看法正在演进。从其他灵长类动物来看，表现出悲伤可能是一种自我保护的策略。如果一只类人猿在失去原有地位时并没有明显地表现出伤感，那么它就会被继续认为是对于当前统治者的威胁——这会是致命的。 Wakefield believes that in humans sadness has a further function: it helps us learn from our mistakes. "I think that one of the functions of intense negative emotions is to stop our normal functioning, to make us focus on something else for a while," he says. It might act as a psychological deterrent to prevent us from making those mistakes in the first place. The risk of sadness may deter us from being too cavalier in relationships or with other things we value, for example. 韦克菲尔德相信人类的悲伤还有更深层次的功能：它有助于我们从自己的错误中学习。“我认为，激烈的负面情绪有这样的作用，它可以使我们正常的活动停止，以便我们可以在一段时间内专注于某些事物”，他这样说到。首先，悲伤作为一种心理威慑，可以阻止我们犯错误。举例来说，在某段关系或者其他一些我们看重的事情里面，悲伤的风险令我们不再那么英勇无畏。 What's more, says Paul Keedwell, a psychiatrist at Cardiff University in the UK, even full-blown depression may save us from the effects of long-term stress. Without taking time out to reflect, he says, "you might stay in a state of chronic stress until you're exhausted or dead". He also thinks that we may have evolved to display sadness as a form of communication. By acting sad, we tell other community members that we need support. 保罗·基迪韦尔是英国卡迪夫大学的精神科专家。他认为，进一步而言，即使是完全的抑郁症，也能使我们免受长期压力的影响。他毫不迟疑地说：“你可以呆在一个充满慢性压力的地方，直到崩溃或者死亡”。他同时认为，我们也许已经将表现悲伤变成一种交流的方式。通过悲情流露，我们可以告知其他交流对象——我们需要帮助。 Then there is the notion that creativity is connected to dark moods. There is no shortage of great artists, writers and musicians who have suffered from depression or bipolar disorder. It would be difficult to find enough recognised geniuses to test the idea in a large, controlled study, but more run-of-the-mill creativity does seem to be associated with mood disorders. Modupe Akinola and Wendy Berry Mendes of Harvard University found that people with signs of depression performed better at a creative task, especially after receiving feedback that was designed to reinforce their low mood. The researchers suggest that such negative feedback makes people ruminate on the unhappy experience, which allows subconscious creative processes to come to the fore, or that it pushes depression-prone people to work harder to avoid feeling bad in the future . 而且，有这么一个说法，认为创造力是和消极情绪有关。从来不乏一些患了抑郁症或者是躁郁症的杰出艺术家、作家和音乐家。想要规模地、可控地验证这个说法将会非常困难，因为找不到足够多的公认的天才。但许多一般意义上的创造似乎都与情绪障碍有关。哈佛大学的莫杜浦·阿基诺拉和温迪·门德斯发现，在一项创造性测试中，那些有抑郁表征的人表现得更为出色，特别是在接受到那些刻意加深他们低落情绪的反馈之后。研究者指出，这些激烈的反馈信息可以使人们对于不幸的经历有更深的体会，因此，潜意识里的创造能力才显露出来。或者说，这些反馈信息迫使有抑郁症倾向的人努力工作，以避免未来会有糟糕的感觉。 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Don't be happy, worry 别高兴，要难过 There is also evidence that too much happiness can be bad for your career. Ed Diener, a psychologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, and his colleagues found that people who scored 8 out of 10 on a happiness scale were more successful in terms of income and education than 9s or 10s - although the 9s and 10s seemed to have more successful close relationships . 许多证据表明，兴奋过度对你的工作有害无益。爱德·迪纳是伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳香槟分校的一名精神科专家，他和同事发现了，在满分为10分的幸福指数的测试中，那些得了8分的人比那些9分或者10的人更为成功，无论是在收入上还是受教育程度上。尽管那些9分和10的人看起来与成功更为接近。 This could simply demonstrate that the happiest people are those who cherish close relationships over power and success, but it could also signal that people who are "too happy" lose their willingness to make changes to their lives that may benefit them. Medicating sadness, Keedwell suggests, could do the same - blunting the consequences of unfortunate situations and removing people's motivation to improve their lives. Giving antidepressants to people whose real problem is something else - a bad relationship, for instance - may allow the person to continue in an unhealthy situation instead of addressing the underlying problem. 这简单证明了，最幸福的人是那些将亲密关系视于权利和成功之上并懂得珍惜的人。但是这也表明了，那些“过于幸福”的人失去了改变现有生活的意愿，尽管这些改变可能会使他们受益。基迪韦尔认为，对于悲伤的药物性治疗也是如此。这种治疗钝化了不幸遭遇造成的影响，消除了人们企图改善生活的动机。对于那些真正问题出在别处（比如说，一段糟糕的关系）的人而言，给他们用抗抑郁的药物会使得他们继续停留在一种不健康的状态里，而不是去处理真正的问题。 Whether or not a little sadness is useful, everyone agrees that clinical depression is not. Unfortunately it's not clear exactly where to draw the line between the two (see "Sad or depressed?"). So which is more dangerous: to over-medicate normal sadness, a feeling which may lead us to re-evaluate our lives after the loss of a job or the end of a relationship, or under-medicate clinical depression? 无论一段小小的悲伤情绪是否有益，每个人都认同临床抑郁症是无益的。不幸的是，悲伤和抑郁之间的分界线并非很明朗。诸如失业或者失恋引起的正常的情绪伤感，尽管这些情绪可能会引导我们重新对生活做出价值评断，但当事人仍被过量用药；而对于临床抑郁症患者而言，给予正常剂量的药物治疗。这两种情况，哪种更可怕？ Ian Hickie of the Brain and Mind Research Institute at the University of Sydney, Australia, insists that depression is not overdiagnosed but would rather it were than see seriously depressed people left out in the cold. He points out that there is evidence to suggest that the number of suicides has declined as more cases of depression have been diagnosed. It's important to take borderline diagnoses of depression seriously, he says, because "most of the suicides do not occur in the most severely depressed". 来自澳大利亚悉尼大学大脑与心智研究所的伊恩认为，抑郁症并没有高估，而是更应被重视。否则，严重的抑郁症患者会因为遭遇冷落而离世。他指出，有证据表明，越多的抑郁症患者得到重视，自杀的人数就随之减少。他说，将重度抑郁的诊断边界放宽是非常重要的，因为“绝大多数的自杀并非发生在最严重的抑郁症患者身上”。 Wakefield, however is uneasy about prescribing pills where there is no certainty that they are needed. After all, he points out, antidepressants have side effects, some of them serious. 尽管如此，韦克菲尔德觉得，去给一个并非真正需要药物的人开处方，是件不轻松的事。他说，毕竟，抗抑郁药物有副作用，其中的一些还非常严重。 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The need for sad 悲伤的必要性 So where does this leave the notion of human sadness? Should we accept that major life events may make us so sad that we are temporarily disabled? Or should we run to the doctor in the hope that pills will speed up our emotional journey back to happiness? 那么，人类的悲伤情绪到底是怎样呢？我们是应该接受人生中那些足以使我们短暂崩溃的不幸之事，还是应该求助于医生，希望药物可以加速我们的哀伤进程，以使我们更快回到幸福的轨道上去？ Ken Kendler, a psychiatrist at the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, points out that for some people, sadness is definitely something they are better off without. He recalls a mother in her late 20s who came to him because she had an inoperable defect in her aorta that would rupture at some undeterminable time in the future, killing her instantly. This knowledge had made her depressed - certainly with reasonable cause - but she did not want to live the rest of her days that way, unable to function for her family. 肯·金德勒是列治文（加拿大西岸的太平洋沿岸的城市。译者注）弗吉尼亚联邦大学的一名精神科专家。他指出，对于某些人而言，悲伤显然是不必要的东西。没了悲伤，他们会过得更好。他提起这样一位母亲：将近30岁的她来求助，因为在她的一条主动脉上存在着某种缺陷（inoperable defect 。译者很迷茫），所以主动脉会在将来的某个不确定的时间爆裂，这会使得她当场死亡。得知此事之后，她陷入深深的悲恸之中。当然这是情有可原的，但是她不愿用那种方式度过余生，她不想对家庭无所贡献。 "That seemed to me to be an irreproachable logic on her part," Kendler says. "I started her on antidepressants. She came back much brighter. The idea that I was depriving this woman of the proper grieving experience and preventing her from experiencing deeply the meaning of this rang very hollow in this particular case." “她无可指责”，金德勒说：“我开始对她进行抗抑郁药物的治疗，她开朗了许多。我确实剥夺了她某些痛苦的体验，我确实制止她去更进一步体验这种经历。但是在这个案例中因此引发的质疑，都是苍白无力的。” For those of us not faced with such an extreme problem, Terence Ketter, a psychiatrist at Stanford University in California, is more cautious. "The cost of happiness is complacency," he says. Sadness is still something useful: "Discontent can drive change. Certainly, you don't want to stifle or blunt emotion - emotion is information." 特伦斯·凯特是加利福尼亚州斯坦福大学的精神科专家，他显得更为谨慎。他认为，我们中的大部分人并不需要面对这么极端的问题。他说：“幸福的代价是完整的（complacency。译者又迷茫了）”，悲伤仍然有用，“穷则思变。当然，你不愿意扼杀或者钝化情绪，也是明智的”。 Keedwell agrees. "Clearly, if we didn't feel sad when we were unsuccessful at achieving certain goals, we would not stand back from that goal and introspect and perhaps try to change our strategies," he says, echoing Wakefield and the Harvard creativity study. "Being enthusiastic and jubilant we would probably go blindly on." 基迪韦尔对此表示同意。在回应韦克菲尔德及哈佛大学的研究时，他说：“很明显，当我们无法达到特定目标时，如果我们不感到悲伤，我们就不会重新审视这个目标，也不会进行反思如何去改变我们的策略。在激情和欢喜的状态下，我们可能会变得盲目”。 So is there some middle ground? Both sides agree that there are ways to lift the gloom without pills. "An alternative would be thinking about what is making you unhappy," says Wakefield. "Another possibility is watchful waiting. A more nuanced view of the situation will help people think about their options better." 那么，这里是否存在中间地带？双方都认为存在着不用药物而消除有仇的方法。韦克菲尔德说：“对于那些引起你不快的事情，你要改变一下看法。另一种可能性正在等你。在这个问题上，更细致的视角会使人们对他们的所选感到更好”。 Diener also suggests we stop obsessing about being happy all the time . "One of the things we want to do is disabuse people of the notion that they're not happy enough," he says. He cites a study that used emotion-recognition software to work out the Mona Lisa's inner feelings . It concluded that she is 83 per cent happy. The rest is a mix of negative emotions like fear and anger. That, it seems, is just about right. 迪纳也建议说，我们应该放弃“时时刻刻的幸福”，他说，我们所要做的，就是使人们接受他们“并不够幸福”的这个观念。他提到了一项运用情绪辨别软件来分别蒙娜丽莎的内心感觉的研究，该研究表明，蒙娜丽莎的幸福程度是83%。其余的则是混杂着恐惧与愤怒的激烈情绪。这看起来，它好像就是那个样子。

Re: 大家有没有在特别伤心的时候 手的虎口酸？

Re: 大家有没有在特别伤心的时候手的虎口酸？