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Good news for people who always fail to see the silver lining on clouds. A report in this month’s New Scientist, suggests that a tendency to get down when life beats you up can be good for you. A growing number of cautionary voices from the world of mental-health research are claiming that it isn’t a good idea to use antidepressants to help get rid of unhappiness in the consequence of a marriage breakdown, death or redundancy because, “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, serves an evolutionary purpose。”

　　Jerome Wakefield, a clinical social worker at New York University explains that depressive feelings are part of our biological makeup. “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. I think that one of functions of intense negative emotions is to stop our normal functioning, to make us focus on something else for a while。” While Paul Keedwell, psychiatrist at Cardiff University claims that even full-blown depression may have its purpose, saving the sufferer from the effects of long-term stress. Without a mental pause, he argues, “you might stay in a state of chronic stress until you’re exhausted or dead”。