Real Suffering Cannot Be Comforted by Words—Only by Becoming Stronger

“You don’t have depression. Your life really is just that terrible.”

— As quoted by a borderline-personality-disorder patient on Zhihu, recalling a line her attending physician said to her.

A friend born in 1978 recently learned that his only teenage son (in junior high) has cancer; not long before, his wife and father had also been diagnosed with cancer one after another. The middle-aged man collapsed at once. His monthly income is only about 10,000 yuan, barely enough to cover treatment for three cancer patients and household expenses. A male colleague born in 1975 had just died of uremia. One blow after another made him doubt life entirely; once cheerful, he became morose. He has grown far more sensitive and now fears disease terribly. Over the next years he will have to live long-term with anxiety and depression, because several of his closest relatives are now under daily threat of death.

In the building where I live, a family of three—grandfather, father, and son—successively died of bone cancer within less than three years; Beijing’s excellent medical resources could not save them. In the end only a middle-aged woman remained, who had lost her only son, her husband, and her father-in-law; the poor woman lost her mind.

A patient’s daughter has parents with cancer, a husband with renal failure on long-term dialysis, and small children of her own; she alone holds the family together. Over the years, whenever she brought her family to me, I refused to charge her anything, but she always felt obliged and found ways to bring me gifts to express her thanks. Fortunately she has not broken down. Even so, I can clearly feel she is not happy.

For people like these, psychological trauma and oppressive emotion are objectively real, and such wounds cannot be soothed by words. Will time heal them? Perhaps yes, perhaps no; some people may be permanently altered into pessimists, rarely knowing joy again.

I entered psychiatry naturally through dealing with cancer. The cancer patients and families who came to me almost all had some degree of psychological distress. Our society has long stigmatized mental illness; its sufferers and their families easily live under discrimination and fall into economic hardship more readily than most. Like people living on the margins of society, they lack better opportunities, mostly occupy society’s lowest rungs, and rely on social assistance.

Humans still lack deep understanding of the causes of over 90% of congenital mental disorders, but the psychological damage caused by traumatic events is readily observed. Soldiers and survivors of war, women and children trafficked and abused, patients and families tormented by chronic disease, and people who have endured repeated major setbacks may all develop mental disorders. Some are transient, others permanent. Psychiatrists try every means to help patients recover and ease their pain, but results are often unsatisfactory.

Mental disorders usually begin as sensitivity and suspiciousness. Sensitive people are more fragile and struggle more in real life; they more easily form catastrophic thinking, feel pessimistic and hopeless, and suffer. They progress from sensitive to oversensitive, then to panic or delusion, until a mental disorder forms, they lose reality-testing ability, and their adaptation to everyday stimuli declines sharply.

To ease inner pain, in later stages they withdraw from people, using avoidance as a self-defense against social pressures they cannot handle. This makes them increasingly dull—oversensitive in some ways, overnumb in others—until they can no longer enjoy normal emotional life like ordinary people, struggle economically, and some eventually choose suicide to end everything.

Their initial sensitivity is usually triggered by catastrophic events—war, disease, abuse—that overactivate the amygdala; their alarm system frequently flashes red inappropriately, and their affect, mood, and cognition are dysregulated, leaving them in a state of chronic hypervigilance.

The COVID-19 pandemic gave physicians a chance to observe depression arising. Many people developed post-COVID depression, suddenly unable to feel life’s joys, easily infected by negativity, and often sunk in fear, grief, and gloom. At first many medical workers thought the virus had damaged patients’ brain nerves. But in my observation that is not entirely so. The plague’s social lockdown, universal fear and anxiety, disruption of normal life, economic decline, and social unrest all affected everyone; these external pressures activated many people’s alarm systems, making them far more sensitive and fragile than before.

In fact, after every historical plague, society as a whole becomes more depressed than before, and it takes years to recover. Just as each of us needs years to recover from heartbreak or bereavement, society’s vitality after a plague takes years to return. Studying human history, one finds such phases sometimes last over a century; humanity keeps repeating this painful, chaotic process, which we vividly call “times of turmoil.”

Painful memories seem to rewrite a person’s genes, triggering them again and again for the rest of life and plunging them into negative emotion and chaos. If a suffering is shared by a whole people, that painful memory can affect the entire human genome. Moreover, if a person or group whose sensitivity has been overactivated then has children, there is a risk of passing high sensitivity to offspring; over half of mental disorders can be inherited directly or across generations.

I suspect some familial mental illness relates to the catastrophic experiences of ancestors. In reality we see that members of some families are often more sensitive and fragile than others, with poorer social adaptation and a chronic, uncomfortable defensive state. Humanity’s overall mental state is also bound up with the broader environment. Though depression and anxiety are not contagious like bacteria and viruses, they show clear clustering by era.

We can sense this in the literary style of different ages. Plagues in the late Eastern Han dynasty reduced the population by 80%, giving the “Jian’an literary spirit” an unmistakable despondency; the Song literati at their peak wrote ci poetry pervaded by idle, listless melancholy, and the emptiness after drunken excess likewise makes people frail. Humans break down mentally both under intense suffering and under excessive ease. We are born to possess only limitedly; excessive possession brings either emptiness or pain.

Humanity has always sought paths to spiritual liberation. From ancient times to now, the suffering each of us endures is much the same. Buddha summed up life’s eight sufferings: birth, aging, illness, death, parting from the beloved, union with the unpleasant, failure to obtain what one seeks, and the flourishing of the five skandhas—a remarkably accurate summary. Even today, humanity is still widely tormented by these eight. In each of our lives we inevitably must deal with them.

How can we lessen this suffering? Our ancestors tried many ways to soothe their hearts, producing philosophies, religions, customs, and other intangible cultural heritage that consoles people; in encountering and studying them, our hearts do find some comfort.

With scientific progress, modern times added psychology and psychiatry as new disciplines to ease mental suffering. But if we study psychology and psychiatry closely, we find that most modern therapeutic techniques borrow from the experience and wisdom of ancient religion, philosophy, and folk practice. Others anesthetize themselves with alcohol and drugs—also a helpless choice, because they have no better outlet for their pain.

Of all human losses, the loss of love causes the deepest pain. What most soothes a person’s mental suffering is love and companionship—not only romantic love, nor even only love between humans: love can grow between a person and a pet or a collection, and immersion in a hobby or calling also generates love. But lifelong, sustainable love is rare and cannot be forced; most people must repeatedly endure the pain of losing love throughout life.

Most of us know how important it is to teach our descendants how to earn a living, but few realize it is equally important to teach them how to better handle life’s catastrophic upheavals. We should deliberately train children, from an early age, to bear pain and loss; give them death education; and keep reinforcing it.

Anthropologists have found good emotional-rearing techniques among some ethnic minorities. On certain Pacific islands, for instance, there is a tradition: parents play with toddlers until the children are delighted, then suddenly turn cold, letting them adapt to disappointment. Such training makes children less sensitive to setbacks and loss, and they grow up to be happier.

This closely resembles the development of the human immune system, which built itself by fighting countless nonfatal microbes; it then helps us resist many diseases. People in developed countries, overprotected and rarely exposed to dirt from childhood, actually have weaker immune systems than people raised in squalid environments in less-developed countries. Indigenous Americans who had never known smallpox died in massive numbers, driven back and nearly exterminated by the virus brought by European explorers. After COVID-19, human immunity declined markedly; a major reason is that social isolation kept common pathogens from circulating as they normally do, and overprotected people lost the chance to train their immune systems.

Social development is also stripping away much emotional support. Early humans lived in tribes, each person emotionally linked to the whole group. Later the tribe became the extended family, and families united by marriage. People naturally built cooperative and emotional bonds with many relatives, so when struck by risk or loss they could gain some compensation through kin support.

But with time, kinship systems worldwide are crumbling; these blood-based emotional bonds grow ever fewer and weaker, and people’s resilience to catastrophe grows ever thinner. So people today seem more prone to mental fatigue than our ancestors. Though the material life and life expectancy of ordinary people today exceed any historical era, the prevalence of mental illness keeps rising; the WHO projects that depression will soon become the world’s leading cause of disease burden.

The happiness brought by civilizational progress is limited. We must keep exploring the wisdom that lets people feel more happiness; prevent more life tragedies through better genetic and child-rearing principles; and build better social institutions to reduce suffering during catastrophes. If the children we bear go on to live in constant pain and cannot feel life’s joy, then bearing them is selfish.

Today we should recognize that learning the skills of living happily is also a required course in life, as important as earning a living, perhaps more so—because mental disability can strip even a capable person of the ability to support themselves. Martin Seligman, former president of the American Psychological Association, spent his career enhancing people’s ability to reduce suffering and perceive happiness; he even wrote a book called The Optimistic Child.

Respecting a child’s individuality, giving full freedom of expression, allowing and encouraging their own hobbies, encouraging and helping them build healthy emotional bonds with others, and letting a child live a diversified life from an early age—all effectively strengthen their resilience. For when suffering strikes, anyone or anything that can divert attention and rekindle vitality helps. In the long life ahead, no one travels smoothly; the stronger one’s ability to resist pain and perceive joy, the less exhausting life becomes.