Chapter 5 Issues of Mood and Anxiety

Whenever I visit my local bookstore, I see a wide variety of books on depression and anxiety in the self-help and psychology sections. I wonder, Are people's lives sadder than they used to be? Unlikely. Over two thousand years ago the Buddha taught that suffering is part of life. Old age, illness, and death are certainly inevitable. War, loss of love, and frustrated ambition have been around for centuries. Are people having more difficulty coping? Perhaps. But maybe depression and anxiety are getting more attention, coming out of the stigma closet as it were. And it is likely that contemporary twenty-first-century financial and job pressures are adding to the mix.

Contemporary society is indeed stressful, and pain is a part of life. It is worth noting that one finds books on spirituality contemporaneous with the upsurge of books on anxiety and depression. The religion of one's forefathers may not provide the answers to contemporary society's sadness and stress, but people do seem to be finding help in their personal spirituality.

The relationship between creativity and mood disorders, I believe, is not easy to tease apart. Psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison, for example, explores whether creative persons are more subject to mood disorders, a topic to be discussed later in the chapter. When I brought this issue up with my brother, a physician, he offered that people who suffer from mood disorders are more creative in order to solve problems - a creativity born of necessity, as it were. Neither is the relationship between anxiety and creativity an easy one to sort out. Anxiety may drive some types of creativity, while in other cases anxiety may result in conformity. Too much anxiety can lead to poor productivity. I experienced the latter among undergraduate students during my teaching career. Some of my most creative students suffered from anxiety and/or depression, and the anxiety in particular would render them unable to function when they needed to most.

Questions I wish to address in this chapter include: what are issues of mood and anxiety, and how can issues of mood and anxiety benefit from spiritual strategies? I believe spiritual interventions for depression and anxiety can be very effective, albeit not necessarily replacing pharmacological treatments. Uncovering creativity is implicit in all treatments for mood and anxiety, I suggest, and can assist in recovery from and management of illness.