Before We Hurry to Silence It, We Should Listen to What It Has to Say
If depression is a journey, recovery cannot always mean returning to the starting place.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Grief knows its object. Depression often does not. But that does not mean that depression is always meaningless suffering. Often, it is suffering whose meaning is asking to be discovered.
Still, we must be careful not to romanticise depression. Depression can be a disabling, even deadly, illness. Such depression requires urgent and intensive treatment. But neither should the most severe cases determine how we understand all depression.
Diagnosis
Today, in England, around one person in six is prescribed antidepressants. Numbers on this scale should make us ask: is this all mental illness, that is, a biological disorder of the brain, or is it also a problem with modern life?
If at least some depression arises from a problem of living, then the depression is pointing straight at the problem. By treating it as a biological disorder of the brain, we are hiding the problem and prolonging the pain. Our depression may be telling us, look, something here is seriously wrong, something here has to change, you can’t go on like this.
Treatment
Treatment cannot simply aim at silencing it. If a fire alarm is sounding, disabling the alarm may bring relief—but it does not put out the fire.
Instead, treatment should be more like an exploration and journey. Already in the thirteenth century, Dante gave us the right image. At the beginning of Inferno, he finds himself alone in a dark forest, having lost the straight path. The forest is dark and dangerous. Yet the only way out is through it.
If depression is a journey, recovery cannot always mean returning to the starting place. Because the starting place may have been the problem.
Depression can be an illness, but it can also be a form of intelligence. Before we hurry to silence it, we should listen to what it has to say.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Who never ate his bread with tears doesn’t know what life tastes like. —after Goethe
In many cultures, especially for men, crying is considered to be undignified and infantile behaviour, except in certain specific circumstances such as mourning the loss of a relative. After childhood, men shed tears much less frequently than women. The reasons for this are partly biological, but mainly sociocultural.
‘Crying’, or ‘tearing up’, is not just one thing. There are in fact three types of tear, two of which are rather uninteresting: basal tears that lubricate and protect the eye, and reflex tears that flush out irritants such as smoke particles or onion vapours. The third type of tear is, of course, shed in response to emotion.
Crocodile Tears
Whereas many animals have basal and reflex tears, emotional tears appear to be uniquely human. Although other animals, of course, vocalise and express distress, there is no convincing evidence that they shed tears for emotional reasons. So, presumably, if women cry more often than men, it is because they are more human? Elephants and chimpanzees are sometimes said to ‘weep’, but it has not been conclusively demonstrated that these are indeed emotional tears. On the other hand, we can be pretty sure that crocodiles don’t sob. The expression ‘to shed crocodile tears’ has its roots in an ancient legend, according to which crocodiles pretend to weep to either lure or mourn their prey.
What I Remember from Med School
Reflex and emotional tears are produced by the lacrimal gland and drained through the nasolacrimal duct into the nose, which is why we also sniff when we cry. Any excess fluid spills out of the eyelid and trickles along the side of the nose or surface of the cheek, forming teardrops. Damage to the ophthalmic branch of the trigeminal nerve desensitises the cornea, impairing the production of reflex tears. However, it is the parasympathetic division of the facial nerve that is responsible for making tears, and damage to the facial nerve, as in Bell’s palsy, can lead to a decrease in tear production.
Existential Tears
When we think of crying emotional tears, we think of sadness and grief. But we also shed emotional tears in response to a range of other, sometimes positive, emotions and feelings, including elation, laughter, love, frustration, pain, anger, and surprise. We may also cry in response to music, beauty, kindness, yearning, reunion, or anything that strikes us as poignant. What all these instances of crying have in common is not sadness, but significance.
Social Tears
Crying is not merely a private affair. Tears may serve a number of social functions. In particular, they may serve to convey our emotions while emphasising their depth and sincerity; draw attention, sympathy, and assistance at a time of danger, distress, or need; and serve as a signal of appeasement, dependency, or attachment. If someone cries in our presence, it is almost impossible not to be moved, even changed, by that. No surprise, then, that tears can also be used to manipulate and deceive. The younger you are, the better you know this.
Healthy Tears
In ancient and mediaeval times, physicians believed that crying purged excess humours from the body. This idea survives in the modern scientific notion that emotional tears serve to excrete stress-related substances such as ACTH. But the more important purgation is, of course, psychological.
Crying may help us to feel better, in particular, by enabling us to experience, express, and ‘process’ our emotions. In the Poetics, Aristotle argues that tragedy, by arousing emotions such as pity and fear, brings about a catharsis—a purgation or purification—of such emotions. After crying, we may feel not better exactly, but differently: calmer, clearer, more reconciled to life, or simply more certain of who we are and where we stand.
Crying as a Way of Knowing
Emotional tears signal moments that are of existential importance in our lives. They tell us that something matters deeply. Sometimes we know what that something is—the death of a parent, the birth of a child—but at other times our tears seem to know before we do, and to arrive bearing a message.
Imagine that a relationship or friendship has broken down. Three months later, or even three years later, you sit down on a park bench and unexpectedly begin to cry. Those tears tell you something that you may not have known, something that you may have been guarding against: that you still miss the relationship, and that it mattered more than you realised. The tragedy is when the other person also has their park bench moment, but neither of you acts upon it.
Thirty years, gone like that.
We do not always cry because we know what matters to us. Sometimes we know what matters to us because we cry. In this sense, crying can be a way of knowing, revealing deeper truths that reason, thought, and language cannot reach. It sometimes happens that we cry without quite knowing why. When that happens, we should ask ourselves: What does this mean? What is the more refined part of me trying to tell me?
What brings us to tears changes as we change. A child might cry because they are underwhelmed by their Christmas presents. The sadness is real because, at that age, the presents really do matter. As we mature, the objects of our tears change along with our hierarchy of values. We cry less at the frustration of our immediate desires, and more at an unexpected kindness, a beautiful landscape, a piece of music, an abstract value like dignity or freedom, or the human condition.
We cry for our ex not merely because we can’t have them, but because they can’t have us.
Three ancient mind exercises for processing and subliming bad news.
Imagine: Your house has been burgled. You’ve been fired. Your partner cheated or walked out on you. You’ve been diagnosed with a life-changing condition…
Bad news can leave us in a state of dread and despair. It seems like our whole world is falling apart, almost as if we’re being driven into the ground. We fear the very worst and cannot get it out of our mind, or gut. Often, there are other emotions mangled in, like anger, guilt, despair, betrayal, and love.
Bad news: we’ve all had it, and the worst is yet to come.
So, how best to cope?
I’m going to give you three cognitive strategies, or mind exercises, that I picked up from the Stoic philosophers—who, in the second century, could count the Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, among their followers.
All three strategies aim, in one way or another, at generating perspective. While reading, hold a recent piece of bad news in the front of your mind, and consider how the strategies might or might not apply to your bad news.
Contextualization
Try to frame the bad news, to put it into its proper context. Think about all the good things in your life, including those that have been and those that are yet to come. Remind yourself of all the strengths and resources—the friends, facilities, and faculties—that you can draw upon in your time of need. Imagine how things could be much, much worse—and how for some people they actually are. Your house may have been burgled. Yes, you lost some valuables and it’s all such a huge hassle. But you still have your health, your job, your partner… Bad things are bound to hit us now and then, and it can only be a matter of time before they hit us again. In many cases, they are just the flip side of the good things that we enjoy. You got burgled, because you had a house and valuables. You lost a great relationship, because you had one in the first place. In that much, many a bad thing is no more than the removal or reversal of a good one.
Negative visualization
Now focus on the bad news itself. What’s the worst that could happen, and is that really all that bad? Now that you’ve got the worst out of the way, what’s the best possible outcome? And what’s the most likely outcome? Imagine that someone is threatening to sue you. The worst possible outcome is that you lose the case and suffer all the entailing cost, stress, and emotional and reputational hurt. Though it’s unlikely, you might even do time in prison (it has happened to some, and a few, like Bertrand Russell, did rather well out of it). But the most likely outcome is that you reach some sort of out-of-court settlement. And the best possible outcome is that you win the case, or better still, it gets dropped.
Transformation
Finally, try to transform your bad news into something positive, or into something that has positive aspects. Your bad news may represent a learning or strengthening experience, or act as a wake-up call, or force you to reassess your priorities. At the very least, it offers a window into the human condition and an opportunity to exercise dignity and self-control. Maybe you lost your job: time for a holiday and a promotion, or a career change, or the freedom and fulfilment of self-employment. Maybe your partner cheated on you. Even so, you feel sure that he or she still loves you, that there is still something there. Perhaps you can even bring yourself to look at it from his or her perspective. Yes, of course it’s painful, but it may also be an opportunity to forgive, to build a closer intimacy, to re-launch your relationship—or to go out and find a more fulfilling one. You’ve been diagnosed with a serious medical condition. Though it’s terrible news, it’s also the chance to get the support and treatment that you need, to take control, to fight back, to look at life and your relationships from another, richer perspective.
A Taoist story for the road
There’s a Taoist story about an old farmer whose only horse ran away. “Such terrible news!” said a neighbour. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” replied the farmer. The next day, the horse returned with six wild horses. “Such wonderful news!” exclaimed the neighbour. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” replied the farmer. The day after that, the farmer’s son tried to tame one of the wild horses but got thrown off and broke a leg. “Such terrible news!” cried the neighbour. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” replied the farmer, biting into a peach. A week later, war broke out: thanks to his broken leg, the farmer’s son managed to escape military conscription. “It all worked out really well in the end,” said the neighbour, “such great luck!”
“Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” replied the farmer, rolling his eyes.
Neel Burton is author of Growing from Depression, which is currently free to download from his website bookstore.
The Angel Standing in the Sun, by JMW Turner (cropped)
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 17 August 2026.
The Stoic Seneca (d. 65 CE) is the master of the ‘consolation’, a letter written for the express purpose of comforting someone who has been bereaved. Seneca wrote at least three consolations, to Marcia, to Polybius, and to Helvia. In the Consolation to Helvia, he comforts his own mother Helvia on ‘losing’ him to exile—an unusual case, and literary innovation, of the lamented consoling the lamenter.
The emperor Marcus Aurelius (d. 180 CE) had at least 14 children with his wife Faustina, but only four daughters and one unfortunate son, Commodus, outlived their parents. In the Meditations, Marcus likens his children to leaves, and paraphrases Homer in the Iliad:
Men come and go as leaves year by year upon the trees. Those of autumn the wind sheds upon the ground, but when the spring returns the forest buds forth with fresh vines.
The image is deliberately impersonal. To a parent, the death of a child is a profound loss; but to nature, it is no more extraordinary than the falling of a leaf. The Stoic challenge is, somehow, to hold both perspectives at once.
Marcus was a Stoic, and would have known, at least in principle, how to cope with grief, loss, and bereavement. But if Seneca could have consoled Marcus on the loss of his children, and could only have told him three things, what would he have told him?
A Life Can Be Sufficient
First, Marcus, remember that life is given to us with death as a precondition. Some people die sooner than others, but life, on a cosmic scale, is so short that, really, it makes no difference. Even children are known to die—indeed, they often do—and these, Marcus, simply happened to be your own. A human life, however long or short, or great or small, is of little historical and no cosmic consequence. Since a life can never be long or great enough, the most that it can be is sufficient, and we would do better to concentrate on what that might mean. A short life may be complete, just as a long life may be squandered, or drag on for far too long. It is not how many years we have, but what we make of those years, or the shape of those years.
Is Death Really Such an Evil?
Second, it may be that death is in fact preferable to life. Life is full of suffering, and grieving only adds to it, whereas death is the permanent release from every possible pain. Indeed, many people who have died—think only of our friend Cicero—would have died happier if they had died sooner. If we do not pity the unborn, why should we pity the dead, who at least had the benefit, if benefit it is, of having existed? The unborn cry out as soon as they are delivered into the world, but to the dead we never have to block our ears. If weep we must, it is not over death, but the whole of life, that we should weep. Marcus, you may find this bleak, or me brutal. But if death is a loss to those who remain, it does not follow that it is a misfortune to the departed—and we should not deepen our grief by assuming it is so. When King Midas compelled the wise Silenus to reveal what was best for human beings, he replied: ‘Not to be born; and, failing that, to die soon.’
The People We Love Are Only on Loan
Third, we should treat the people we love not as permanent possessions but as temporary loans from fortune. When, in the evening, you kiss your wife and children goodnight, reflect on the possibility that they, and you, might never wake up. In the morning when you kiss them goodbye, reflect on the possibility that they, or you, might never come home. That way you’ll be better prepared for their eventual loss, and, what’s more, savour and sublime whatever time you spend with them—and, in that way, lead them to love you more.
If you do lose a loved one, do not grieve, or no more than is appropriate, or no more than they would have wanted you to, but be grateful for the moments that you shared, and consider how much poorer your life would have been if they had never entered into it.
Sometimes, like now, Marcus, our grieving is recent or prominent, but in truth we are permanently grieving. We accumulate losses—people, places, possibilities, former selves. Much of that grief simply recedes, only to resurface more softly in our quieter moments.
Everything leaves us, and if they do not, we leave them.
Continue Exploring
If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Stoic Stories, an overview of Stoicism through its best stories.
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