I came across another thoughtful article by Mary Kenny, this time about how we have lost touch with the importance of feeling sad, and our sensitivity to the different shades of sadness that can come upon us has been dulled.

Prince Hamlet
Depression, thank goodness, is much better understood than it used to be. And we are much more likely than we used to be to express our feelings to others. But our emotional vocabulary has become diminished.
Take the word, “trauma,” which is now frequently and commonly invoked in conversation today. A person who has suffered a bereavement is said to be “in trauma”.
“Trauma” comes from the Greek word for a “wound”, and in a medical sense, it is what happens to the body when a wound delivers a shock.
But bereavement, of which I have much sorrowful experience is, alas, part of the natural course of life’s sad events.
As Shakespeare observes, with Hamlet, his father lost a father, and that father lost a father before him, and so on, ad infinitum, through the hinterland of human history.
Grief is desperately upsetting: it hurts you for ages, and the loss of someone you love is emotionally painful, and can be enduringly so. But why not call it by its proper name: bereavement: grief: loss?
One reason, thinks Mary Kenny, is that we are losing touch with the social rituals that have allowed us to express these feelings.
When I was a young woman in France in the 1960s, you would come across a shop with its blinds drawn, and a notice saying: “Ferme pour deuil”: closed for mourning.
It is still seen in France, and is also a usual response in Italy. Mourning symbols were widespread in all cultures – widows’ weeds, black armbands – and the community was expected to respect those who mourn.Outward signs of mourning have declined, if not been abolished in more secular societies now: but our sense of sadness and loss endure, and instead of this being called mourning, it is called “trauma”.
And she thinks it would help us if we could recapture some of the wider, non-medical vocabulary for the emotional difficulties we face in the ordinary course of human experience.
Depression may also be melancholy: it may be discouragement, disappointment, abandonment, sadness, sorrow, mourning, rejection, regret, anxiety, grief, obsession, introspection, loss, separation, loneliness, isolation, alienation, guilt, loss of hope, temperamental woe and simple, pure, unhappiness.
It can be forms of low mood now out of date. The Edwardians were very keen on a condition known as “neurasthenia”; Virginia Woolf was diagnosed with it.
It was also known as “nervous debility”, or, in its milder form, being hyper-sensitive and thin-skinned.
“Anomie” was another condition once favoured in the 19th Century by the sociologist Emile Durkheim, and from a sociologist, a sociological condition. Anomie was defined as an isolated mood caused by the breakdown of social norms, sense of purpose and rules of conduct.
There was also a spiritual form of depression called “accidie” much brooded on by some of the saints – this was “dryness of the soul”. The writer Malcolm Muggeridge also complained of suffering from it at times.There are even, I think, some romantic-sounding forms of melancholy: the German idea of weltschmerz – a yearning sense of “world-sorrow” and unfocused sadness for humanity: or the French nostalgie du passé, that bittersweet Proustian condition of longing for the past, with a rueful sense of regret for missed chances and lost opportunities.
I also rather like mal du pays – the exile’s yearning for the country of childhood, and it comes to me in flashes, both in the spring and autumn, when I think of Irish country lanes, and the smell of fields of mown hay. Ah, bonjour tristesse!
No doubt we are better off for shedding much of the stigma surrounding mental illness – but with it, have we lost some of the variety, the dark poetry of the human condition?
When I was a little girl my Auntie struggled with depression. Through out her life I had heard her being referred to as mentally ill, a manic depressive, then later as Schizophrenic, and today would possibly be called bi-polar. I just remember her being high and low at different times and needing medication to control her mood swings. One wonders how her everyday up and down natural feelings were over shadowed by the permanent labels of her intermittent illness. How very sad not to be allowed to experience natural sadness.
And then there’s…..De amone heroico or poetically ‘hereos’
“over heating of the spirit in the heart, brain and the entire body.” or to all of us Love sickness.
When we get better at expressing our joy, happiness and Love, then also we will get better at expressing our sadness, brokenness and sorrow.
More poet less Englishness !
Better still, more English poets please!
Like Mary Kenny, I grew up in the 1960’s. I too remember curtains being drawn for the day when a death occurred or a funeral was taking place. This was in England, though. Over the years, I have noted the slow demise of some of the rituals associated with death that she mentions – things which, today may be regarded as quaint touches of a bygone age. Nonetheless, I feel they are things which help people to come to terms with the harsh reality of the sad event which has happened and they also show respect for the dead person and those who mourn their loss.
It is interesting how our vocabulary has changed over the last 50 years. Words such as ‘trauma’ which, as Mary Kenny points out refers medically to a huge shock to the body when wounded are used in everyday parlance. It seems that the threshold for emotional distress has been lowered to the point where such words can apply to more trivial things such as missing a TV programme.
I like your choice of title for this post, Father Stephen. I would, however, differ with you. I think people know how to be sad. Its just that there are not enough words out there now to genuinely reflect their level of depression/ grief/ loss or whatever they are experiencing. Moreover, with the many changes that have happened in society, there is that presence of Durkheim’s ‘anomie’ where people don’t know which way to turn due to, perhaps, too many choices and rules – or none at all for them.