Saturday 21 October 2017

The point of depression

a post by Charles Foster for the OUP Blog

There has been a great deal of speculation about the evolutionary significance and origins of depression. What selective advantage does it confer?
  • Does it allow the patient to concentrate on complex and important problems?
  • Is it a type of pain that, like physical pain, causes us to pull back from danger?
  • Is it a type of behavioral quarantine, causing us to hole up in a safe place while dangers stalk around outside?
  • Perhaps it reduces our libido and our appetite for social interaction in order to stop us getting or giving infectious disease?
  • Is it a simple signal that we need help?
  • Is it a sort of threat to others in our community that, unless they do something to help us, they will have a liability in their midst that could endanger them?
  • Is it a sort of fuse, switching us off and causing us to back down when we are outgunned – so saving us from risky and costly conflicts with our peers?
These suggestions, and the many others in the literature, may seem insulting and insensitive. Isn’t it like asking the point of a disabling road traffic accident?

Well, possibly. But much disease is the result of the malignant transformation or manifestation of a physiological response that is usually useful. Auto-immune illness and allergy, for instance, are damaging consequences of facilities without which we would be dead. So the desire to squeeze depression into the neo-Darwinian paradigm is not necessarily misconceived. What is misconceived, I suggest, is the sheer fancifulness of many of these suggested explanations. Their authors are too clever, ingenious, and imaginative.

Continue reading

I would take issue with some of the points this author raises but maybe that *is* the point – that we should say “it’s not like that for me” and start a reasoned discussion. If it’s not like *that* then what *is* it like?
And, more importantly in my opinion, what can be done to alleviate the condition.



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