What is sadness? Internal and external influences with an emphasis on mental illness

As a follow up to my posts on happiness, I'll attempt to provide insight into the often extremely powerful emotion of sadness. I think there's a difference between sadness and depression. Sadness is caused more by external factors. Depression can be existential. It's often chemical, caused by an imbalance. You can be depressed sitting in your home alone for no reason. I don't consider that sadness. Granted, it's splitting hairs a bit but I think there is that difference. Sadness is defined more by things that make us sad. Failures in the material world, failures in love, failures at things that are important to us cause sadness. That comes from our expectations. If we have a more fragile brain chemistry, what are typical, normal, unescapable life events that trigger sadness can shift into the dark, black moods of depression. As a bipolar person, I know that feeling, the transition of sadness (like being pushed to the edge) from depression (which is falling off that edge.) Social standards often play a huge role in sadness. In a given culture, what is valued, what garners pleasurable rewards, or what produces a general sense of self-worth and self-esteem (sometimes all three combined) create our views of what is good (that which we've come to internalize as valued) and what is bad (that which is considered socially out of step.) It is possible (and does happen) that, due to mental illness, specifically emotional illness, a person can internalize "crazy" ideas of what is valued and what is not. Unless a person lives in a society where the mentally ill have dominant influence (and that really doesn't exist), the person can become sad because what they tend to value, which can become very distorted, is not valued by the culture. Even worse, the person with a mental illness is presented with an ultimatum by his/her peers: Either go to a psyche clinic and/or take drugs or you will be ostracized from the culture, a culture which often produces the stigma that a mentally ill person can trigger in ignorant non-sufferers. This can make the sufferer very, very sad. The mentally ill person is a victim of illness but it's an illness that makes the majority of people very uncomfortable. The societal perspective on mental illness is the more sufferers, the more accepted it is. Depression and anxiety, and those that suffer from them, are relatively accepted. They're considered as "not that bad" as far as social condemnation goes. Many famous people have depression and anxiety so this stigma is lessened. Bipolar disorder is much less accepted. Bipolar is much more alien to the majority and much more feared. "Aren't those people violent?" the majority asks. Even those that suffer from depression and anxiety can come to condemn the bipolar. In their need to be accepted by the majority, they can attack bipolar people with as much ferocity as "normal," healthy people do. "We have depression and anxiety but we're not as bad as those people!" they say. I have experienced such things. The sadness that comes from being a member of a marginalized group becomes worsened by being a marginalized person IN that marginalized group! Poor schizophrenics have it the worst. They suffer enormously yet are reviled by the general public. "We know those people are evil!" they say. Serial killers, both real and fictional, are branded as violent schizophrenics. Schizophrenic sufferers, already bombarded with nightmarish delusions and hallucinations, are finished off by the ignorant hate of the general public. These people are murdered inside and out. Being a bipolar person (who has had hallucinatory and delusional symptoms triggered by depression), it makes me VERY SAD to see people suffering worse than I. A strong moral center based on compassion can be both a credit and a burden in this way. The pain of others can exacerbate the chemical fragility of the brains of the mentally ill. This "weakness" adds to the cycle of sadness. This sad worldview, a very real reality to the mentally ill, thus becomes a further descent into the grave of pessimism already dug by the progression of illness. The only way to cope with this existential, ever present sadness is to try and change our perspective. To minimize sadness, one has to destroy or change the views internalized early on by majority opinion. We learn things from our normal peers in school. This is often to hate what we feel inside ourselves. Crazies are evil, we're taught, so we come to hate ourselves because of what we see as that "evil" brewing inside us as we get older and more stressed. We shove dark thoughts down deep, hoping that they'll go away. That we have these symptoms is another source of sadness. We, often fueled by ignorance even in our own family members, thus making our support systems counter productive, come to blame ourselves. We're "evil" and we "know" it. One has to grow cognitively and learn new perspectives or face complete oblivion. It's the only way the sufferer can broaden his/her horizons and gain relief from the total sadness of feeling like a societal burden without mentally detaching (escaping) from reality. Cancer patients are justly pitied; the mentally ill are blamed and loathed. This is how it has been. Will it change in the future? Will we, as a majority, come to see the truth and to accept our mentally ill population as sufferers and not perpetrators? Time will tell. Thank you for reading his far. I'm sorry if I repeated or lapped myself.