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Depression May Provide Cognitive Advantages
Hugh Pickens writes "Paul W. Andrews and J. Anderson Thomson, Jr. argue in Scientific American that although depression is considered a mental disorder, depression may in fact be a mental adaptation which provides real benefits. This is not to say that depression is not a problem. Depressed people often have trouble performing everyday activities, they can't concentrate on their work, they tend to socially isolate themselves, they are lethargic, and they often lose the ability to take pleasure from such activities such as eating and sex. So what could be so useful about depression? 'Depressed people often think intensely about their problems,' write the authors. 'These thoughts are called ruminations; they are persistent and depressed people have difficulty thinking about anything else. Numerous studies have also shown that this thinking style is often highly analytical. They dwell on a complex problem, breaking it down into smaller components, which are considered one at a time.' Various studies have found that people in depressed mood states are better at solving social dilemmas and there is evidence that people who get more depressed while they are working on complex problems in an intelligence test tend to score higher on the test (PDF). 'When one considers all the evidence, depression seems less like a disorder where the brain is operating in a haphazard way, or malfunctioning. Instead, depression seems more like the vertebrate eye — an intricate, highly organized piece of machinery that performs a specific function.'"
You have higher cognitive ability, you realize how the world runs, you get depressed. Not the other way 'round.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I find it much more difficult to think logically about my own emotional problems when I am depressed. In that state, introspection is likely to lead to more depression. That's why it's referred to as a vicious cycle — depression is depressing! So it might be easier to figure out other people's problems but I'm skeptical that it actually leads to solutions to one's own social problems. Then again, perhaps that's just because I'm personally poorly socialized.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A trait that confers resistance to malaria when you get both or one of the dominate forms of hemoglobin from your parents, but you get screwed if you get both recessive genes. The odds get better for the majority of combinations, but one particular outcome is worse.
Maybe natural selection is selecting for more analitical thinking in most combinations of parental genes, but the group that gets all the recessives ends up with depression.
Depresses the hell out of me.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Most mental disorders are a result of an otherwise normal or useful mental process run-amok. Happiness and energy are good, but take them too far and you've got mania. Organization and hygine are good, but take them too far and you get OCD. Depression when half your family just died in a car wreck and your life is in turmoil is a normal part of coping, depression all the time when nothing is particularly wrong is a disease.
Give it a couple of years and it will be referred to as our "Outlook Orientation," and the government will commission a study to see if depressed people are being properly represented in grade school textbooks.
This article pretty much describes me to a T. I have been suffering from depression for a few years now and whenever I get down, I definitely have the thinking patterns that was described in this post. However, after going through depression, I have decided that it is much, much better to be ignorant and happy than depressed and realistic.
While depressive people tend to consider a problem very intensely and break it into lots of sub-problems and try to analyze what could have happened if some options were different, all those - ruminations (as the summary states) - still lead to nothing because the all the shit has already hit the fan and there is nothing that can undone that. so the thoughts go round and round and round again.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
But chronic pain is not so wonderful.
Having an immune system is also beneficial to survival. Multiple sclerosis, not so great.
Eat well, and realise that your mind lies to you about how bad things truly are.
That's how I get by.
Besides, the roller-coaster ride can be quite fun. Even when careening down the spiral I somehow take some joy from this. Maybe it's that I realise my mood bears no likeness to reality.
Life is about the experience. Enjoy every dirty, awful bit of it. :D
They even take antidepressants, which make them feel they don't have to change anything at all..
Well anti-depressants, if prescribed properly, do the exact opposite. They enable people to change their environment and break the vicious cycle of depression.
I'll give you the example of someone who, due to their depressive state, is incapable of leaving the house. Without going in to much detail, this will make their depression worse. Give that same person some anti-depressants and they might feel good enough to leave the house, make new friends and create a positive reinforcing cycle. By the time the wean off the drugs, their environment might have changed such that they remain happy.
Don't believe all the negative publicity; Drugs can be very helpful.
I suspect that whether or not a clearer view of reality confers an advantage depends in large part on the circumstances, mostly the cost of failure vs. possible success.
In a system with debtor's prisons, being optimistic about your small business plan is probably a stupid idea. In a system with comparatively mild bankruptcy terms, and relatively easy incorporation, optimism may well be a very lucrative virtue. In some clannish honor-bound society, being optimistic about your chances with a possible sexual partner could get you killed. In a bar full of strangers in the modern west, the potential downsides are pretty low(assuming social rejection doesn't bother you).
Broadly, depending on the prevailing ratio between possible downsides/worst case scenarios and possible upsides/best case scenarios, a delusionally positive perspective could be highly adaptive, or swiftly lethal, or somewhere in between. A delusionally negative perspective could be as well, in principle.
"Alpha children wear grey They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfuly glad I'm a Beta "
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
OK, I solved the problem of overpopulation. But nobody cares and somebody will steal my solution anyway, so now I'm going to kill myself.
I'm so depressed.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Well said. The key here is choice. You've made choices to alter both the course and tenor of your life. Being happy is not something that happens to one, it is a choice that one makes. Not always easy (and often very hard), but possible. I've known others who have turned their life around in similar fashion, and they have my highest respect.
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
This is well known and documented already. Knowing about reality can be a real downer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism.
Alcohol is a depressant. Now we can conclude that alcohol helps us solve complex problems! Bonus!
Normal, healthy people enjoy poisons. Listening to sad or depressing music makes us feel better. Tales of tragedy are inspiring. Confident, happy people seek out danger.
Life is full of ironies and paradoxes. What confounds me is that our modern view of such things is so narrow that instead of celebrating life as it is, we insist on classifying non-productive or poorly understood aspects as an illness as though the "good" could exist without the "bad". And illnesses, we all know, requires treatment.
Depressed? Sucks to be have to be at work in the morning, but by all means, indulge yourself with your favourite poison, put on some blues music, share depressing stories, and if needed, go start a fight or do something reckless. Chances are you'll be a healthier and happier person for it. And maybe, according to the article, smarter.
Life is about the experience. Enjoy every dirty, awful bit of it.
Thanks for that. I've heard many times people saying that they'd like to die quietly in their sleep without ever seeing it coming and I just don't get it. The ugly parts of life are still life. I don't enjoy pain, but in my view death is the end of life (chuckle all you want - many people disagree). And it's the only thing that we all share. I'd like to see it coming and, avoiding years of agony, a few days of despair and slipping away seem interesting. Sorry, morbid.
Life is what it is - Work to make it as good as you can, but embrace it all. Even the awful stuff.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
The interesting question is whether that optimism offers an advantage to our current society...
My pet theory(largely baseless speculation alert) is that a degree of selection for optimism is extraordinarily useful; but that, past a certain point, it becomes toxic.
Without some degree of optimism, you get highly stagnant arrangements, where advances are rejected out of hand as being untraditional("That isn't how we do things here", "The old ways are best", "If it was good enough for $HISTORICAL_FIGURE, it's good enough for me") and people's individual attempts to improve their position attract mostly spite("trying to rise above your station?", "Do you think you're better than us?", "Acting White", "Our family have always been $SOCIAL_POSITION", caste systems, etc.). That is obviously inefficient, not a recipe for improvement, and substantially unjust to boot.
On the other hand, in an excessively optimism producing environment, where the risk/reward ratio is skewed enough, your society's elite will come to consist largely of people who have never faced a consequence with actual teeth in their entire lives, and who are no longer defined by their ability to solve real problems; but by their ability to gamble constantly, taking the winnings and being shielded from the losses. Such people, even if intellectually capable of understanding risk, won't have the visceral, emotional experience of it that TFA describes as having cognitive advantages. They won't really believe in it.
This I suspect(admittedly without any great evidence) is why highly complex, advanced, and powerful societies have a nasty habit of falling into decay and/or being sacked by barbarians. If the people who control a society's direction(and, democratic fantasies to the contrary, this is always a society's elite) don't really understand that the world does, in fact, have hard and immutable edges, constraints that nothing will swoop in and save you from, that a call to your parents will not get rid of, that god will not provide a way around, they'll always be playing a game at some level. They'll be selected(by the society's abnormal risk/reward ratio) for boundless self confidence and excessive levels of risk-taking.
For a while they, and the society, will fly high; but sooner or later it will crash into some hard constraint or another and be eaten by people for whom risks are fatal rather than financial, and very, very real. (Even on a much more mundane basis, day to day, an optimist may be a natural fit for marketing; but you'd really rather the guy who handles your backups be pessimistic with a side of paranoid.)