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The mental-health industrial complex insists sadness is a disease, but it’s part of human nature.
In the years since Sigmund Freud discovered the couch, Americans got the strange idea that happiness is the natural human condition. Unhappiness, they decided, is a psychological problem. “Unhappiness is both a political state and a mental health crisis,” wrote Tara D. Sonenshine in the Hill in 2024. In a Guardian piece last month, therapists described patients who became “depressed” by political stress.
Despite the narrative that it’s a disease to be treated, unhappiness is totally normal.
Humans aren’t designed to be happy all the time. We have what psychologists call a “negativity bias,” a well-documented tendency for negative stimuli to register more than positive ones. Harvard’s Roy Baumeister described this phenomenon in a foundational 2001 paper suggesting that “bad” hits harder than “good” in everything from learning to emotions to relationships. Happiness is so statistically abnormal that one clinical psychologist proposed (albeit facetiously) that it be classified as a psychiatric disorder.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Wall Street Journal
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Carolyn D. Gorman is a Paulson Policy Analyst at the Manhattan Institute.