Tragic, dire, disheartening and urgent (10)
I believe the answer is:
depressing
'tragic' is the definition.
(thesaurus)
'dire disheartening and urgent' is the wordplay.
'disheartening' says to hollow out the word (remove centre letters).
'and' says to put letters next to each other.
'urgent' becomes 'pressing' (synonyms).
'dire' with its middle taken out is 'de'.
'de'+'pressing'='DEPRESSING'
(Other definitions for depressing that I've seen before include "Causing dejection" , "Making miserable" , "Disheartening" .)