Depression - An Adaptation?

[Ahso!]

Psychiatrist Andy Thomson and psychologist Paul Andrews both share an evolutionary perspective in their fields and the two decided to explore depression (rumination) from that view. Their findings are interesting.Andrews and Thomson struck up an extended conversation on the evolutionary roots of depression. They began by focusing on the thought process that defines the disorder, which is known as rumination. (The verb is derived from the Latin word for “chewed over, which describes the act of digestion in cattle, in which they swallow, regurgitate and then rechew their food.) In recent decades, psychiatry has come to see rumination as a dangerous mental habit, because it leads people to fixate on their flaws and problems, thus extending their negative moods. Consider “The Depressed Person, a short story by David Foster Wallace, which chronicles a consciousness in the grip of the ruminative cycle. (Wallace struggled with severe depression for years before committing suicide in 2008.) The story is a long lament, a portrait of a mind hating itself, filled with sentences like this: “What terms might be used to describe such a solipsistic, self-consumed, bottomless emotional vacuum and sponge as she now appeared to herself to be? The dark thoughts of “The Depressed Person soon grow tedious and trying, but that’s precisely Wallace’s point. There is nothing profound about depressive rumination. There is just a recursive loop of woe. The two argue rumination is an adaptation which is actually a mechanism we've developed to protect us from neglecting our need to be more thoughtful individuals. Imagine, for instance, a depression triggered by a bitter divorce. The ruminations might take the form of regret (“I should have been a better spouse), recurring counterfactuals (“What if I hadn’t had my affair?) and anxiety about the future (“How will the kids deal with it? Can I afford my alimony payments?). While such thoughts reinforce the depression — that’s why therapists try to stop the ruminative cycle — Andrews and Thomson wondered if they might also help people prepare for bachelorhood or allow people to learn from their mistakes. “I started thinking about how, even if you are depressed for a few months, the depression might be worth it if it helps you better understand social relationships, Andrews says. “Maybe you realize you need to be less rigid or more loving. Those are insights that can come out of depression, and they can be very valuable.

This radical idea — the scientists were suggesting that depressive disorder came with a net mental benefit — has a long intellectual history. Aristotle was there first, stating in the fourth century B.C. “that all men who have attained excellence in philosophy, in poetry, in art and in politics, even Socrates and Plato, had a melancholic habitus; indeed some suffered even from melancholic disease. This belief was revived during the Renaissance, leading Milton to exclaim, in his poem “Il Penseroso: “Hail divinest Melancholy/Whose saintly visage is too bright/To hit the sense of human sight. The Romantic poets took the veneration of sadness to its logical extreme and described suffering as a prerequisite for the literary life. As Keats wrote, “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?There are of course those who disagree both mildly and otherwise.

If this fascinating subject interests you, the full story is at Depression’s Upside - NYTimes.com

It's seven short pages, but worth the read, IMO.

[G#Gill]

Very interesting, Ahso!.......................... I'll give it a read in a while.