What’s an economist to do?

Howard Jacobson in the Independent puts in his pennyworth on the economic crisis. He says that the tendency of commentators to give dire warnings about how bad the recession could be merely causes it to end up, like a self-fulfilling prophecy—or, as he calls it, a “mass psychogenic illness”—just as bad as they warned it would. Undoubtedly this will have occurred to many others—after all, the free market economy (especially the stock market) essentially trades on irrationalism. But here’s the problem: what’s an economist (or any other commentator) to do? Surely it’s equally, if not more, damaging to warn nothing at all? The best way seems to be to warn, but express the warning in as reassuring and comforting a way as possible. However, this seems to me to be just as likely to dig ourselves into a deeper hole of recession than what commentators do presently—by not being made aware of the worst possible scenario, we unwittingly stumble into it anyway.