What is Deep Sadness? 

If stories are medicine, then the words and language we choose to express those stories must be chosen carefully. There is a Bantu principle, called nommo, which refers to the power of the spoken word to invoke material change. "Depression," as it is used in Western culture, is a term that is so overused and misunderstood that it is almost rendered meaningless.

What all of the women in this study have in common is that they live with some form of what I call "affective difference," meaning that they live with a set of conditions that make them vulnerable to being debilitated by atypical affective responses to stress, life, and loss.

To move away from jargon, I used the term "deep sadness" in my study. The word "sad" has its roots in terms that mean "full," or "satiated," which conveys the idea of the unbearable heaviness that comes with depressive affective experience. "Deep sadness" is a term meant to convey a heavy, full feeling that has profoundly penetrated a person's existence.

At least one of my study participants took exception with my use of this term, stating that what she felt was way, way beyond sadness:

"To me, sadness is often caused by something outside of you. You lose something, you're hurt by what someone said, and it makes your sad. But if you find what you lost, or you're given something that is deeply valuable, or that person comes back and restores the relationship, you're no longer sad, so from me that emotion of sadness is really tied to a situation, whereas depression is really internal and systemic. It was oblivious to outward changes - so I could win the lottery and it still wouldn't take the depression away - it wasn't because of something, it was just there. It is a total shutting down."

Why is it so hard to give this experience a name?

Part of the problem is that people use a lot of different narratives to understand depression, and the language we use (e.g., mental illness) is often strongly linked to an ideological stance. Using options currently available, choosing a term often ties one to a particular model.