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”。
Although, it is important to be careful when talking about depression, having the upside traced in your downside will have an irresistible appeal to all those who take the phrase “Cheer up. Love, it might never happen” as a personal insult. It will be manna especially for creative types, who will have long suspected that crying a lot was a sign of their inward genius. During test(微博)s at Harvard, the News Scientist reports, people with signs of depression performed better at a creative task, especially after receiving feedback that was designed to reinforce their low mood. Although it is old-fashioned to claim that creativity is connected to gloomy moods and a grey outlook on life, all the best stuff is written by some grim-faced pencil chewer with a heart pumped by angst。
Richard Yates, whose novel Revolutionary Road is about to win an Oscar, has written seven novels and two collections of short stories, each more hopelessly miserable than the last. After years of accounting the impossibility of his toothless, drunken mother, his experiences in the second world war and divorces, Yates finally rounds things off in Disturbing the Peace by fictionalizing how a cocktail of alcoholism and psychotropic drugs had him take off his clothes and wander the streets of LA, giving all his money to beggars, convinced that he was Jesus. It is cruel-but so readable。
So, although the grand majority will never write anything as good as Yates, there is something to be gained from looking on the dark side. In a work environment, for example, disconnected people tend to achieve greater success than those of a sunny nature. It’s enough to make a pessimist dissolve into a Cheshire Cat grin。
1.Researchers in mental-health field regard sadness as____。
[A] a glimmer of hope to people in difficulties
[B] a normal disease among the distressed
[C] a biological component of human being
[D] a contributing factor to eventual success
2.The views of Jerome Wakefield and Paul Keedwell on depressive feeling are____。
[A] different [B] complementary [C] opposite [D] similar
3.The word “manna”(Paragraph 3) most probably means____。
[A] a gift [B] a pain [C] a reward [D] a challenge
4.The story of Richard Yates shows that depressive men tend to be____。
[A] serious and mature
[B] brave and talented
[C] creative and persistent
[D] unfortunate and degenerate
5.According to the text, we can learn that____。
[A] The number of people addicted to antidepressants is on the rise
[B] Antidepressants may be going against human being evolution
[C] The writers are at high risk of suffering from depressive disorder
[D] Discontented workers may be more popular than the sunny ones
写出下列词汇(词组)在文章中的意思。
Para. 1
in the consequence of (L4)
redundancy (L5)
Para. 2
presume (L3)
chronic (L8)
Para. 3
irresistible (L2)
appeal (L2)
insult (L3)
Para. 4
miserable (L2)
Para. 5
tend to (L3)
答案：1C 2D 3A 4C 5B
