Why depression?
As anyone who has suffered from it knows, depression would seem to have few or no good points; the only reasonable approach seems to be to find a way to make it stop, the sooner the better. Indeed, depression exacts a terrible toll in terms of lost time, lost energy, and even lost lives.
So why do people get depressed? With such unpleasant or even dire consequences to this illness, why was it not eliminated by natural selection long ago? It’s not a disease of aging, like most cancers, so that can’t be it. As unlikely as it seems, depression may be best viewed as an adaptation that offers the benefit of uninterrupted, highly analytical cogitation about complex problems. This article from Scientific American explains how the symptoms of depression might fit this interpretation, and offers some evidence that prolonged, productive contemplation of one’s problems might in fact help depressed people gain insight into their problems and thus be better able to resolve them.
This idea is, frankly, a hard sell for me, because when I’m depressed, all I want is to feel better right now. However, I have encountered various books that suggest that depression sometimes has something to tell you, in roughly the same way that physical pain can alert you to a danger that you must address. As is almost always the case when I’m thinking about depression, I’m torn between the idea that depression is a sign that something is out of whack biochemically and needs to be set right, and the idea that it is a sign of emotional imbalance that needs to be explored and corrected. Both are probably true to differing degrees in different situations, so it’s worth looking into all the options available when you are depressed (medication, changes in diet and exercise, writing in a journal, counseling, and so on).
I’m also curious about the possible connection between depression and the typical diet in industrialized countries. I’ve been reading more about omega-3 fatty acids since I heard that talk last week about fats and the brain; the average American diet is seriously lacking in these necessary nutrients, which have been tentatively linked with depression. If depression is indeed an adaptation, I wonder if dietary deficiencies or other aspects of the way we live are inadvertently tripping the mechanism for this adaptation at times when it doesn’t actually do us any good. At any rate, it never hurts to nourish your brain well, both physically and emotionally.
This is a correlation from which a totally different causation could be inferred.
My experience with depression leads to the definition that depression is the state which exists when a disproportionate amount of time is spent in non-productive personal analysis (mostly going in circles, drawing unsatisfyingly incorrect conclusions based on incorrect assumptions).
So here’s my theory. Prolonged abstract analysis has been selected for because it can help you obtain food. When contemplating how to kill an animal, it will often be beneficial to ignore substantial elements of reality and instead focus on a single detail, such as the design of a knot to be used in constructing a trap. Modern man abuses this capacity, misapplying it to the pursuit of things we do not need. Depression is not the result of the capacity for thought any more than it is the cause of it. Depression is the result of the _misapplication_ of this capacity.
The fact that chemicals are involved in depression is no more significant than the fact that water is involved in a river. If the cause is so clear, then so is the solution.