Addicted to Feeling Sad?

Death happens. Sometimes, people can't get over it. And sometimes, it seems, loved ones get so annoyed they wonder if the bereaved ought to simply join the one they're bereaved over. This post appeared in Dear Prudence August 17, 2009:

"Dear Prudie,

My mother's grief makes me uncomfortable. She lost her mother more than a year ago and still cries copiously and frequently (in public and in private) when she thinks about it. She brings the death up in unrelated conversations with strangers (including cashiers!), acquaintances, and friends."

Prudie replied that she thought the mother might be suffering from a newly recognized "distinct syndrome" and referenced a Washington Post article. In the article, Rob Stein describes what psychology and psychiatry professors are finding: that there is a specific system in the brain that is used in certain people who suffer from seemingly unending grief. Thus, it may be a physiological syndrome rather than a stubborn unwillingness to let go of the person who died. They're calling it complex grief (does that make people who can move on simple grievers?).

In the article, professors talk about why the use of this particular part of the brain is significant:

Mary-Frances O'Connor from the University of California at Los Angeles says: "'This is the part of the brain involved in knowing that you want something. When people who are not adjusting well are having these sorts of thoughts about the person, they are experiencing this reward pathway being activated. They really are craving in a way that perhaps is not allowing them or helping them adapt to the new reality.'"

"The same brain system is involved in other powerful cravings, such those that afflict drug addicts and alcoholics," says Stein.

Bingo. So the complex grievers are addicted to something. To happy memories, according to the article. But the grievers weren't addicted to their loved ones before they died--only after they were taken away. Is it possible that these people are somehow predisposed physiologically to wanting what they can't have? Does the process of craving without the reward of satisfaction feel good to them, good enough to become trapped in a neverending cycle of sadness?

There are a lot of online forums, like yahoo or ehealth, for people who feel this way.

"Sadness is the only thing that makes me feel alive," says a frequenter of one forum. "Sadness is the best drug I can get my hands on."

"There's something alluring about it, seductive," says another. "Maybe its the self pitying that is so attractive--it mocks self love."

Someone else writes on a yahoo forum that he is addicted to depression because of the art he produces while under its spell: "I've tried to write when I'm happy--honestly, I can't write when I'm happy," he says (Virginia Woolf was bipolar and wrote during almost hysteric bursts of productivity).

Rob Stein posits that the recent physiological findings on complex grief may explain why depression medication has not worked for these grievers--a different brain system (one involving serotonin) is in use for depression patients. But he didn't consider that there could be such a thing as complex depression. In which case, depression medication wouldn't work for depression addicts or complex grievers. Because in a strange way, they don't want to get better.