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Unselfish People Are More Likely to Wind Up With Depression (vice.com)
People with depression are more likely to feel bad in response to perceived inequality, according to a study published this week in Nature Human Behaviour. From a report: Simply, in experiments where participants were tasked with playing a game with a strong element of unfairness, those participants with higher levels of brain activity in depression-linked brain regions -- as recorded via fMRI scans -- were more likely to later demonstrate signs of clinical depression. This is a new test of an old idea, one that's been demonstrated in previous research. People with depression commonly demonstrate increased concern for others, or for the perspectives of others. More precisely, prosocial attitudes predict depression, which is in contrast to individualist attitudes. Individualist here basically just means selfish, or relatively selfish. The researchers behind the current study hypothesized that they would be able to observe these tendencies at the level of actual brain activity. Fortunately, there are some tried and true methods of testing prosocial behavior. One of these takes the form of what's known as an ultimatum game. The general idea is that participants are offered rewards that are to be shared among a group. Each offer differs in how much the participant gets in relation to the rest of the group, with prosocial participants more likely refuse larger personal rewards in favor of larger rewards going to everybody else. Individualists take the offer that best benefits them, while prosocial people are more concerned with other people in the group.
FTA: The differences in later depression indicators could not be explained away by demographics.
I wonder if they included religious belief/affiliation as a demographic because the game they played is based on economic (i.e. temporal) gains. If everyone was an atheist, this study would hit the nail on the head.
More importantly, IMO, FTA:
The implication is that people with depression (or likely to have depression) generally have a "greater empathic concern for others," in the words of Megan Speer and Mauricio Delgado, psychology researchers from Rutgers University, who penned a related commentary accompanying the study. People with depression just feel bad when others get a shit deal.
The takeaway is much more about generous people being upset about others getting screwed over than, "nice guys end up depressed more than selfish guys."
Failures != nice acts
There are some very mean, selfish, and uncaring individuals that are extremely poor. They just don't grasp how to effectively exploit others. That being said, many times suicide is a selfish act which shows that depressed people can still be selfish. I wonder if these depressed individuals wouldnt be as depressed if they were more selfish in little things but still helped others towards the greater good. Kinda a release valve rather than letting it boil up and fester while being taken advantage of.
I have come across anecdotes about a person's depression being due to them being wrapped up in their own concerns, but when they decided to help other people they discovered that they were also helping themselves because their depression started to lift. As an example of such an anecdote, the start of the semi-biographical movie "Patch Adams" (starring Robin Williams) concerns the main character who enters a mental health hospital due to feelings of depression after his father's death. While there, he strikes up friendships with other patients, tries to cheer them up, and sees that their and his mental health improves. As a result, he discharges himself from hospital and enters medical school so he can have a career helping other people.
So, apparently being unselfish can make you depressed, but it can also help you escape depression. I read the TFM but it is light on details and the main study is behind a paywall. My hypothesis is that feeling bad for the misfortunes of others and doing nothing to ease that misfortune might make you depressed, but feeling empathy for the misfortunes of others and actively trying to help them can give you a sense of purpose, which in turn can bring satisfaction and happiness. As a side effect, working to help others can also increase your social circle and sense of community, which, in turn, are likely to be beneficial for your mental health.
"Life is a comedy to those who think – and a tragedy to those who feel."
Realizing you can't fix things, for an altruistic individual, could be a huge contributor to depression. Caring about other people and coming to the realization that nothing you do can make any sort of lasting difference would be a huge crushing blow to a lot of people. On the flip side, selfish people tend to me more successful because they only look out for themselves, so maybe the reason they don't get depressed is because their brains don't have to deal with the disappointment. Take it to the extreme -- the psychopath executives of large companies don't succeed by helping their employees out...they succeed by squeezing them as much as they can and taking the profit that results for themselves. They're a special case because they're physically incapable of feeling compassion for others, and the worldly rewards they have access to as a result mute out almost any negative feelings.
For the altruistic among us, religion used to provide a buffer against this depression that occurs when finding you can't fix things or people. Religion lets you say, "it's in God's hands" and teachings of most religions tell people to spend their lives helping others regardless of how much impact they make. That's becoming less of a draw these days, and I don't know what average people are going to do about it. Maybe they'll get more selfish. If you don't believe you'll be rewarded after a lifetime of self-sacrifice, maybe the logical step is to try to get as much out of life while you can.
This completely explains the people I know whose lives revolve around hourly outrage against injustice on social media.
They have a personality flaw which causes them to over-empathize, which makes them prone to depression and emotional instability.
Waking up every day and logging on to deliberately find something to be outraged about temporarily resolves their depression by way of providing a strong countervailing emotion -- righteous anger. This also explains why President Trump is the best thing to happen to them and why our culture created him and why TV ratings for certain shows are up this year: his early morning tweets ARE the morning dose the over-empathizers need to push their depression back for a few hours. But of course, once you hop on the SJW cycle, once the outrage wears off you are faced with the sadness of how impotent you are to fix the thing you were insanely upset about, which sets up the depression cycle for the evening, which then requires late night fake-comedy/fake-news shows like Fallon and Kimmel and SNL which act as the evening dose to make people laugh and smooth it over and shake their heads at the world but feel the salve of shared humor.
Next morning the depression has returned and they wake up once again depressed a.f. and need to hop onto Facebook/twitter to get the morning dose.
It also fits with the logic of this brilliant treatise ( https://www.goodreads.com/book... ) on how most of our actions taken as a result of empathy are often really just symptomatic relief for their own anxiety induced by empathy. That is, empathizers do Stand UP! and Take Action! but their actions mostly just help THEMSELVES feel better, while not helping and often hurting the people who are the putative targets of the empathy.
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
True. WW2 (and WW1 for that matter) only helped further increase its success.
The USA was successful because it had (as a whole) huge opportunities:
- A crapton of untapped natural resources, basically "all you want is here somewhere";
- Native population which was easy to get rid of through technological superiority (smallpox also helped);
- A steady influx of people from various nations who really-really-REALLY wanted to succeed (the fact that land was simply given away also helped);
- No neighboring countries who would pose a threat to its borders.
In a nutshell, the land of plenty and no competition. It would have been a miracle NOT to become successful.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)