The advantages of Depression. What role does it play in evolution?

Even you hear about depression everywhere and everyday the past years it does not mean that it never existed before. Maybe it was not such a major mental illness, but it was always there. Research shows that depression is found even in the tribes which are still living reserved in the South America and have never had a contact with the outside world and civilization. Psychology science is still pretty young comparing with the rest so it is normal to presume that the reason why depression became such a subject of discussions and researches now is that simply there was no name for this kind of illness before. Obviously, I must agree that people years ago were not suffering from depression as much and as often as they do now. And it is all the problem of that ‘American dream’ we are all aim to reach. The idea of no limits spoiled us. We aim higher we crash lower.

Just imagine you were a farmer in XVIth century. You live in the time than apple and blackberry were just fruit. You world is as big as you can see from your window and the rest is unknown. You go on with your daily life and can not imagine that something can be different. You live in the reality, maybe not the most easy one, but it’s all yours. And now lets get back to our age. You always hear about these unlimited possibilities, about chasing you dreams, doing impossible possible, seeking career and stuff. It is great. But most of us just aim too much. We live with the idea that we have to reach these dreams even most of the times they are not realistic. Than we get disappointed that our American dream never came true, start the endless cycles of self pity and get depressed. Lets face reality – most of us are simply not born to become new Neil Armstrong, Marilyn Monroe or Albert Einstein.

Bus this post is not about American dream and the suffer we get when we don’t reach it. My aim this time is to briefly discuss what kind of role does depression play in evolution process and what are advantages of depression. You read correctly – advantages. I do believe that nature is perfect. Everything is regulated the way it should be and all bugs which occur are the ones who are there due to the humans intervention. So is the human’s body which is the most amazing system and mechanism ever to be developed by nature. Evolution is the on going process which time by time corrects our mechanisms and lets us adopt to the changing environment. Nature is perfect and all the processes in it have a meaning. Even the negative ones. Or so we think that they are negative. Just think about the situation than you have fever. You take fever as such an annoying symptom. But on itself its absolutely meaningful and has a purpose. Fever fights the infection in your body and fixes it at the same time giving you a signal that something wrong is going on with your body so you should be careful.

So if we presume that everything has a reason and nature created all the diseases in order to tell us something what is the role of depression? What is the aim of depression in evolution process?  Have you noticed that all the genius authors, scientists, musicians – almost all of them were depressed. Even Darwin, the father of evolution theory was depressed. Have you ever thought how come that major mental disorders are extremely rare (Schizophrenia affects less than 1% of population) depression is extremely common (research in the US and other countries estimates that between 30 to 50 percent of people have met current psychiatric diagnostic criteria for major depressive disorder sometime in their lives). This would be explained in a way if depression would be affecting only old people as by the age all parts of out body wear out. However, its more and more young people suffering from depression.

In an article recently published in Psychological Review, which also discusses whether depression is some kind of bug which appeared during evolution process, scientists argue that depression is in fact an adaptation, a state of mind which brings real costs, but also brings real benefits. You would think what can be the benefits of depression? A person lacks motivation and stops getting pleasure from such activities as sex. However, what depressed people do is they intensely think about their problems. As an article in Scientific America says: “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.” Analytic way of thinking is the most productive and that might explain why the best music, scenarios and scientific works were written than their authors were suffering from depression. They managed to split the problems that occurred is smaller parts and solve them in that way, and at the same time as nothing else interested them they could yield themselves to working on that particular thing. And depression here even performs the changes in the body which help to concentrate on one thing – depressed person most of the time stop feeling hungry, doesn’t want to sleep and lose any interest in social interactions. Some of  research have found 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.

Studies even show, that depressed people are better at solving social dilemmas. Andy Thomson, psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, in one article said that recently he has cut on antidepressant medication prescriptions to his clients after the research done on the benefits of depression and its role in evolution. According to him drugs can sometimes interfere persons genuine recovery leaving their social dilemmas unsolved. Depression for these people are natures way of saying that something is going wrong with their life and changes must be made. In the same article Thomson mentioned a female patient who once came to him asking to reduce the dosage of antidepressants. He obviously asked whether medication is not working and what woman answer was that medication were working perfectly for her but she was still married to the same alcoholic husband just now as she is taking medication she tolerate him. This example shows, that sometimes we are so afraid of natural sadness and depression that instead of looking for the reasons which caused it and solving them we just try to avoid it while taking medications.

Nature made depression as way of telling you that you have complex social problems and your mind is intending to solve them because current situation became unbearable. Depression is a chance given to you to reconsider what you do wrong, that you ended up in situation which is making you miserable and until you solve it nothing will give you pleasure anymore. Therapies should try to encourage depressive rumination rather than try to stop it, and they should focus on trying to help people solve the problems that trigger their bouts of depression. Depression after all, might appear to be the state than you actually have something productive done that is going to improve your life.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/m3525848615000v4/

http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/ep05584604.pdf

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Tags: advantages, antidepressants, depression, evolution, rumination, Thomson