Does depression have an upside? Is there some sort of evolutionary advantage for a person to become depressed, for instance, to re-evaluate their lives or perhaps a choice they made that led to their current depression?
Most people who are depressed certainly wouldn’t think so. (I don’t either.)
But it doesn’t stop evolutionary psychologists and other researchers from positing that there may indeed be some sort of evolutionary reason for it.
Richard Friedman, MD, writing in the New York Times today, explores the issue.
He starts with a case study to illustrate the argument:
Consider a patient I saw not long ago, a 30-year-old woman whose husband had had an affair and left her. Within several weeks, she became despondent and socially isolated. She developed insomnia and started to ruminate constantly about what she might have done wrong.
An evolutionary psychologist might posit that my patient’s response has a certain logic. After all, she broke off her normal routine, isolated herself and tried to understand her abandonment and plan for the future. You might see a survival advantage in the ability of depressed people like her to rigidly and obsessively fix their attention on one problem, tuning out just about everything and everyone else around them.
Certain studies might seem to support this perspective. Paul W. Andrews, a psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University, reported that normal subjects get sadder while trying to solve a demanding spatial pattern recognition test, suggesting that something about sadness might improve analytical reasoning.
Other researchers have found that sad subjects were better judges of deception than happy ones. Evolutionary psychologists suggest that perhaps the rumination of people who have depression is an adaptive strategy to solve a painful problem.
But research on this issue is nearly always done on college students, and not even depressed ones at that. That certainly limits the generalizeability of their results, and doesn’t necessarily translate into a better understanding of depression as experienced by people who are actually clinically depressed.
It’s a conclusion Dr. Friedman eventually comes to as well. Even if there’s some “point” to depression, it no longer seems to serve the evolutionary advantage it might have once did.
Regardless of its evolutionary purpose, depression remains a serious but eminently treatable mental disorder. Our minds try to justify life problems in a million different ways. However, none of it helps for us to actually treat the problem in the here and now of people’s personal lives.
Read the full article: Depression Defies Rush to Find Evolutionary Upside
PS – One annoying and very unprofessional trait of some people is to refer to people who have a disorder as that disorder. Throughout this article, Dr. Friedman refers to people with depression as “depressives,” and even quotes other professionals in the article using the same terminology.
People are not the sum of their medical condition. It’s dismissive and degrading to refer to people with mental disorders as though they were one and the same as their disorder, just because some disorders’ names make it easy to do so (e.g., easy to do for people with depression or schizophrenia, harder to do so for people ADHD or bipolar disorder).
Let’s put an end to this practice in mainstream journalism, okay?
21 comments
I can’t decide how I feel about this but have come to the conclusion that I’m too personally involved with the issue having been depressed to varying degrees for a while. But I absolutely agree with your PS. It so annoys me when I am labelled like that. I reluctantly admit I have a few labels, which I choose not to use. But I most of all hate the term ‘depressive’. It sounds to much like I chose to be this way like say a vegetarian chooses not to eat meat. So thank you, and I really hope the message gets out there.
Some great art comes from depression as well. Many great songs, books and even jokes have been written by manic depressives. Still wouldn’t want to suffer from it.
Hey, Mike, No Mike, you wouldn’t want to suffer from it. But I must say my writing (I CURSED GOD, But He Listened Anyway) has never been better, my dancing has gotten more creative on You Tube, my quilts are awesome, and when I’m Old, my Goal… DOCUMENTARY ([email protected])… Hopefully NOW, cuz I’m fixing to lose my house and where will they tape me from, what?… the Library, where I will soon be living. But I am optimistic that I will get my documentary that I so desire. Then again I will be very depressed having to take a sponge bath in the library’s public restroom. Love and Laughter from the Library~~~ Desiree Cart Dugas
Hi, John–
As you and Psychcentral readers know, I agree with both your take and Dr. Friedman’s, when it comes to cases of major depressive disorder [see http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2010/03/01/the-myth-of-depressions-upside/%5D
You are right, too, about not referring to patients or clients as “depressives” (or “schizophrenics”, etc.). I think this is an unfortunate carry-over from general medicine, where, alas, terms like “diabetics” and “asthmatics”–even “migraineurs”–continue to pop up. Thanks for the reminder that those we treat are
persons, not embodiments of disease.
Best, Ron Pies MD
In my opinion, based on my own depression which has had several reoccurances and lasted a long time, if depression does has an upside, some good points, that is far outweighed and overpowered by the down side. The down side for me is suicidal thinking, disconnecting from everyone, isolating, self harm and I could go on and on. When I am clawing my way back to a not so dark place, the fact that there could be an upside to the depression doesn’t help that much. Ending the depression, healing the depression, that is what would be the best thing that could happen for me.
I wonder if pessimism has an evolutionary purpose, and if depression is a side effect of that. Is it clear-eyed pessimists (research suggests that pessimists have a more realistic view of life) throughout history who saw the worst coming and took protective action? To speak in terms of recorded history, was it pessimists in what is now America who mistrusted European settlers? Was it pessimists who saw the storm gathering in Germany? Are pessimists more likely to seek medical treatment early?
Re: The PS
I think different people may have different opinions on this, including those who suffer from depression.
For example, I don’t mind referring to myself as a Jew, even though the totality of my identity is not my ethnic background. If a paper discussing Jews was written, I would not expect them to constantly write “a person with the characteristic of being ethnically Jewish.” For the purposes of the paper what matters is that I’m a Jew, not something else.
Now you may say with depression the difference is that depression is all downside so being referred to as a depressive always has some negative attribution associated with it. However, that relys on your (unproven) notion that there is no upside to depression. If there is, then certain people (not all) may not mind being called a depressive.
I don’t think that there is any a priori argument to be had that it is inherently offensive especially if the context is discussing the upsides of depression.
Jim Sinclair’s rejection of person first language is a great read on this topic:http://www.cafemom.com/journals/read/436505/
I don’t think there’s a right answer about this. I think each publication needs to listen to its readers and decide what terms it should use to prevent offending its particular audience.
Wow, Where to start here. How about this. My background is not psychology. It is in system design. As such I approach even the human being with that kind of visualization. Freud seemed to agree that depression had its purpose, though he had a few different takes on it from his works that I have read.
I will break my opinion down in points. Point 1, depression is to the emotional/ mental being what pain is to the physical being. You would not survive long in this world without the ability to feel pain. Like pain keeps us from putting our hand in a fire every time we see one and want to get warm, negative emotions such as anxiety and depression keep us from repeating the same mental mistakes. Point 2, in some of Freud’s works he (paraphrasing here) considered “depression†to be the fruition of “anxietyâ€. (At least as I understood it.) First we feel anxious and that kicks into problem solving mode. When the mind finds it can not resolve the conflict between the super ego and the id, it falls into depression. Point 3, While if we saw parents inflicting pain on a child we would stop them. If they did it behind doors, bruises would be left and we would stop them. Why, because beating a child would (at the least) lead to physical unhealthiness. However, most of us don’t ourselves recognize emotional abuse, and there are no visual scares to bare witness to emotional abuse. Worse, many of us do it and we don’t recognize it for what it is. The reality is we are really crappy parents. Even those that think we are great, have no grasp of raising the emotional being. From the parent who is overbearing and over caring to the one who “works their butt off to put food on the tableâ€, none of them know how to raise a child who is in control of their emotions and in touch with their subconscious. Last point, at the end of the day, clinical depression, OCD, anxiety, ADHD, ADD, and the entire spectrum of “insecurity dysfunctions†are the result of a lack of education and enlightenment that should have been part of your formative years and gained from your care givers.
We can either deny the findings of the past century about the affects of single parenthood, divorces, drug/ alcohol abuse, hypocrisy, public school’s “lord of the flies†environment, fear driven marketing, and so on. In which case we will have to push happy pills like m&m’s. Or we can come to terms with the fact that 80% our personality exist in our subconscious and we have to parent with respect to that. Take stock in the happy pills.
An upside to depression? That’s like saying there’s an upside to diabetes–after you lose your feet, you don’t have to buy shoes any more. Having been clinically and critically depressed most of my life, I cannot grasp why anyone would waste time and money looking for an upside to depression. Surely there is more worthwhile research to pursue. Likewise, calling me a “depressive” matters not in the least. It’s jargon. Every career field has its own language. If it increases the speed at which researchers and clinicians get from Point A (a diagnosis) to Point B (a treatment or a cure), they can call me anything they want. Everyone knows that every individual can be characterized by more than one label. Call me a “depressive” if you will. Calling me “a person who suffers from depression” doesn’t change that fact or make it any more palatable to me. It just wastes my time.
Read about this in the NY Times as well. The short answer is NO, at least for the individual. Having gone through years of cycling depressions, whatever I may have gained (perhaps additional empathy for those in pain) was not worth the days and months lost, the pain and the inertia. An evolutionary upside to the group? – maybe,it could yet be uncovered; to the individual, no. It’s important not to conflate a stance against stigmatizing people with depression with arguments that the condition makes us special.
Sounds strange, but I actually kind of agree. Maybe not if the depression is WAYYY LONG term… But some good things came out when I was depressed…
My goodness, I cant belive you wrote this article, Dr John Grohol, you know you risk the displeasure and tut tuts of the “positivity police”
Its a great article!…just my opinion, I’d rather be genuinely depressed than ‘too happy to be alive’ but thats my choice.
Interesting article, but the P.S. is what I agree with the most. As an advocate for OCD awareness, I cringe every time I hear sufferers referred to as “obsessive-compulsives.” Surprisingly, it is sometimes the OCD sufferers themselves who use this terminology……not me. I hate it
RE: LOL’s Point 1 “…depression is to the emotional/ mental being what pain is to the physical being.”
No, mental anguish–not depression–is to the emotional/mental being what pain is to the physical being. Having had about 50 years to think about this from the inside out, I don’t think depression has a parallel in the physical world. I would be interested in hearing what others think.
RE: LOL’s Point 2–Freud got some things right, but he didn’t get everything right.
RE: LOL’s Point 3–“…at the end of the day, clinical depression, OCD, anxiety, ADHD, ADD, and the entire spectrum of ‘insecurity dysfunctions’ are the result of a lack of education and enlightenment that should have been part of your formative years and gained from your care givers.”
It sounds to me as if you have your own set of psychological issues that need to be dealt with. It’s also abundantly clear that your background is not in psychology–or psychiatry–or physiology–or biology–or neurology–or enetics or in any other field that is backed by decades of quantifiable medical research and not by magic thinking.
I for one I’m glad I had depression but never want to experience it again. The reason Im glad I had it is now that I got out of it, I can turn around a everyday bad day into a good day. A stressful day is when things aren’t going your way and you want to scream kind of a day is nothing to me now. Although I can say that If I were to go back into a bad depression with manic systems then this time around it may not be a good result so on the other hand I never ever ever ever want to experience depression again.
There is no “psychological” upside to depression. People need to think outside their square and start considering depression simply as a DISEASE, that need to be treated!
Depression – A Nutritional Disorder
http://www.hypoglycemia.asn.au/2011/depression-a-nutritional-disorder/
Cbest, I was being academic in the use of the term depression. Mental anguish is really a leagal term for depression. “Mental anguish: n. mental suffering which includes fright, feelings of distress, anxiety, depression, grief and/or psychosomatic physical symptoms.†It is not even a term in psychology.
Not that I don’t agree with you, but exactly which points did Freud get wrong. I hear this all the time. For many years I was turned off by Freud and Jung as people said this type of thing. Then I started to read for myself. What so far, 100 yrs later, has not been dis proven and in fact much of the field relies on it as fact. His structure of how the personality is divided between the conscious and subconscious. His assessment that 80% of what makes up our personality (this includes if you are a depressive) is driven by things in our subconscious. And that Anxiety, repression, and depression are “defense mechanismsâ€.
Psychological issues, yes. I am “nuttier then a fruit cakeâ€. It gets me lots of friends. You just never know what is going to come out of my mouth. A really long story short, my whole people have been trying to push me into the mental health field. Including a handful who were already in it. I rejected it. (First wanting to be a rock star or a pirate.) For my friends, I hate people. I wanted to sit in a basement and take over the world through a computer terminal. (Ironic this post huh?) So that is what I did. I have identified most of the pathologies that lead to my dysfunction. After taking the MMPI (because it was the only way to get my ex to take one) they found that I have a mild dissociation disorder and When things get really stressful I tend to focus on something with disregard to all other things around me. So, when AD’s took my best friend and wife of over a decade and changed her into a monster right while we raising a 2 yr old, I went on a mission. I have read more books, studies, papers, websites, on the subject of the psychology, sociology, neurology, and genetics then most people with high degrees in those fields.
The fields related to the mind are all theoretical. I don’t believe in magic. Thus I have cited my source. I didn’t just mention legal terms that mean the same thing, state a common misconception, and continue to advocate that “depression just happens with no explanation. It is the only thing in the human body that for some reason exist without reason. It’s magic.†That would mean I have a character flaw indeed.
All, nobody was born to have endless bouts of depression. It was not predetermined and out of everyone control when you come into this world. To date they have found not genetic or biological link to depression. Had you been placed in a different environment growing up, you would not have been “depressed”. (though this country is breeding depression like its a national past time.) The feeling of depression is not magical, or unwanted. But just as having an orgasm all day long would become inhibiting, so it is when the defense mechanism of depression can’t be turned off.
Would it change anybodies mind of they thought of it this way. When somebody close to you dies, you get depressed. Any scientific experiment deals with changing one control and observing the response. What if when somebody died, we instead felt apathetic. Could you imagine a parent who felt nothing when their child died? A world of Casey Antony’s. So depression (and the desire to avoid the emotional pain) dives a parent to be sympathetic and caring towards their child. Physically this dates back to our evolutionary period when a newborn’s parents had to continue care. So let us replace loosing someone with happiness. What could we expect if a person got “joy†from having a family member die? What if the two are combined? What kind of personality dysfunction would occur if a mother was apathetic towards the death of her child and at the same time received joy from the attention that death brought to her from everybody else? I think they call the Munchhausen.
I think in these very elementary cases described above one could say that depression has a function and purpose in the human psyche. What if a child grew up (from the child’s perspective) only getting attention from their parents when they were acting out of their feeling of depression. I theorize that probably, after 10, 15, 20 years of that being the case, a person would grow a certain comfort and disposition on a subconscious level towards “being depressedâ€. Further, depression of this nature, can be taught from generation to generation. Like the experiments done by Stephenson (everybody who has had basic psych knows it as the “Monkey, banana, water spray experimentâ€) where even once the negative consequence was removed, the new monkeys learned anxiety from their cage mates. Just like magic.
I found the term “mental disorder” derogatory, demeaning and offensive. The terms diabetic disorder or asmatic disorder are not in use, your brain is disorderly rather than orderly, such negative language is inherent in this field of medicine.
I think this is a really interesting topic, and my viewpoint is that it really depends on the situation.
For example, if the depression is a result of an outside catalyst that repeatedly asserts itself and keeps the mind in a state of depression, then the end result of the depression could potentially be “wow things have gotten so bad that I now realize I need to make a change.” In that case, while it’s a painful path, it can potentially lead to a positive life change that will leave you finally feeling happy.
On the other hand, if the depression itself is simply in the mind, and it stems from a medical disability to deal with certain problems, or regulate ones own thinking or brain chemicals…then I think there is no up side. This type of depression ruins the good in your life, and takes away any happiness without the necessity to really “change” something externally.
My opinion is my own, and I certainly have no medical qualifications. In fact, my entire idea is predicated on the assumption that some forms of depression are caused by being beat down by your environment for long enough, and some are purely because the way your brain is wired. Whether that is a true assumption, I’m not sure!
There is no “psychological†upside to depression. People need to think outside their square and start considering depression simply as a DISEASE, that need to be treated!
Um…wouldn’t this need to be stated the other way around if we are to think depression has an upside?: Wouldn’t trying to think that their is an upside to depression “thinking outside the square”? Because we already know it is a disease?
OR are we getting confused between Depression as a natural emotion in life confused with Clinical Depression as an illness. In other words, Depression may have an evolutionary aspect–otherwise why would anyone get depression…after a death of a loved one, 9/11, Disasters, Failing a test, mid life crises…etc? It makes people who suffered through that stronger and more aware of their environments.
Where as clinical depression is a medical impairment in the brain on a level that is not purposely happening to “offer” the individual insight (might offer some once treated) It is a serious medical condition that involves neurotransmitters (medication treatment) and nerves(Cognitive Behavioral Therapy treatment) in a strictly clinical sense.
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