Scientific American: Depression's Evolutionary Roots

I've seen a lot of depression these past weeks on my Psychiatry rotation. Truth be told the experience has made me feel very uncomfortable. I'm not a fan of the treatments for depression, which include tranquilizing people with medications or shocking them with electroconvulsive shock therapy. As psychiatrists, we don't have much time for talk therapy, but talking about and analyzing your childhood can only get you so far down the road to recovery in my opinion. Mostly depression stays in the picture for patients, hanging like a gray and dreary backdrop behind picture perfect smiles.

I wonder if we are pathologizing the normal in our diagnoses of depression. This medical specialty makes it seem like a sin to ever feel bad about yourself or, god forbid, not want to see your friends and family at any point in time. I recognize depression can be debilitating for many people, and I'm not encouraging people not to seek help for their mental health issues. I'm saying I feel uncomfortable labeling all negative thoughts as abnormal, and committing people to invalid statuses when they refuse to turn into Polyannas.

This article in Scientific American proposes that depression serves an evolutionary purpose. It begins the case by pointing out that depression is quite prevalent for a condition that doesn't offer some survival advantage. According to the article, nearly 50% have endorsed some symptoms of depression in their life. The authors suggest that depression promotes rumination of complex problems, which leads to greater insight and subsequent resolution of these issues. So perhaps a little bit of depression is needed to hunker down and really begin working out a problem, be it social or intellectual.

Depression can be a miserable, life-threatening experience, and I want to emphasize again that I am not downplaying the risk of suicide and self-harm in depressed indviduals (I'm pro mental-health!). I just don't appreciate the stigma of depression, and wonder if it's possible that an occasional low mood can be a normal, perhaps even helpful part of the human experience.

Depression's Evolutionary Roots