Could Depression Be Beneficial?

Engraving entitled 'Melencolia' by Albrect Durer (1471-1528)

Statistics show that between 30 and 50 percent of people in the U.S. and other countries ~ at sometime in their lives ~ meet the psychiatric diagnostic criteria for major depression. The diagnosis has applied to me at times and many people I know, so I have no reason to doubt the statistic.

That’s why I’m interested in the way a few scientists are now approaching the concept of depression. They're considering that it's could be an evolutionary adaptation that has its dire costs, but also can provide benefits.

Here’s some of what Paul Andrews and J. Anderson Thomson say in a recent Scientific American article:

The symptoms of depression have been found in every culture which has been carefully examined, including small-scale societies, such as the Ache of Paraguay and the !Kung of southern Africa ~ societies where people are thought to live in environments similar to those that prevailed in our evolutionary past.

One reason to suspect that depression is an adaptation, not a malfunction, comes from research into a molecule in the brain known as the 5HT1A receptor. The 5HT1A receptor binds to serotonin, another brain molecule that is highly implicated in depression and is the target of most current antidepressant medications. Rodents lacking this receptor show fewer depressive symptoms in response to stress, which suggests that it is somehow involved in promoting depression. (Pharmaceutical companies, in fact, are designing the next generation of antidepressant medications to target this receptor.) When scientists have compared the composition of the functional part rat 5HT1A receptor to that of humans, it is 99 percent similar, which suggests that it is so important that natural selection has preserved it. The ability to “turn on” depression would seem to be important, then, not an accident.

And a bit later:

So what could be so useful about depression? Depressed people often think intensely about their problems. 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.

This analytical style of thought, of course, can be very productive. Each component is not as difficult, so the problem becomes more tractable. Indeed, when you are faced with a difficult problem, such as a math problem, feeling depressed is often a useful response that may help you analyze and solve it. For instance, in some of our research, we 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.

Indeed, they may be on to something. The important thing, it seems to me, is that this offers a new way of looking at the serious situation ~ deserving of further study ~ other than simply administering drugs to dull the mind into stupefaction.

Click here for the Scientific American article.