Last week, The Economist ran a really fascinating article on recent research into the evolutionary benefits of depression. Why do we get depressed? Why did such a trait come to be, and if it’s so detrimental to our health, why hasn’t it been selected against in the population?
Unobtainable or unrealistic goals? Like, say, beating the odds and selling a story to the New Yorker? Or selling a screenplay to Hollywood for 6 figures? Or how about winning a Hugo award before you turn 30? Could this explain why an unusually high number of artists and creative types suffer from depression?
Creativity is often all about unrealistic goals. The problem is, without them, we would not strive to achieve the things we do finally achieve. Aim for the stars, shoot for the moon, as they say. So, depression is tied directly to our ambition and stick-to-it-iveness? From the article:
Dr Nesse believes that persistence is a reason for the exceptional level of clinical depression in America—the country that has the highest depression rate in the world. “Persistence is part of the American way of life,” he says. “People here are often driven to pursue overly ambitious goals, which then can lead to depression.” He admits that this is still an unproven hypothesis, but it is one worth considering. Depression may turn out to be an inevitable price of living in a dynamic society.
Depression, an inevitability of a dynamic society and a creative lifestyle? What do you think? Is it possible that those of us who suffer so much “creative” anguish would be much happier with our lives if we aimed lower? But would that just be giving up, and just as bad as being depressed? Which is worse, a lack of ambition or being depressed?
The main problem with Rudolph Nesse is that he’s an evolutionary psychologist, a field that’s wildly debated. Opponents of the field suggest that evo psychologists start on a theory and find loose science to prove their point rather then test the theory and toss it out if it doesn’t hold water. I don’t know all about his research methods, but there are some strong arguments that a lot of the evo theory isn’t based on good science. This theory of depression could be a part of that.
In the end we’re an adaptive animal. If depression has a purpose, I’m sure it isn’t to stop a person from being creative. But I’m no doctor.
More on some issues with evo psychology.
http://www.skeptic.com/the_magazine/featured_articles/v12n01_sex_jealousy.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology_controversy
The article describes the research methods pretty clearly. And if there’s a field of science that isn’t wildly debated, I suspect it’s not science :)
Some amount of depression may be inevitable for a creative person in our society. However, I don’t think that we would be happier if we aimed lower. Those times when we create something really special is what keeps us going and in my opinion, what makes life worth living.
But there’s no “the” research methods here — there are psychologists doing different types of research (one, more recent study is described in more depth), and then Nesse (who is not the one doing ANY of this research) making conclusions from that research that don’t hold water.
And even the study that is described in more depth is hugely problematic as described. Do the girls become more depressed because they aren’t able to relax on unattainable goals? Or are the girls unable to see goals realistically because they are *already* on the path towards more severe depression? In the article, they assume the former, but the bulk of research out there points towards the latter.
Miki,
Yeah, fair enough–good points. I don’t think I really have an opinion one way or another. I just thought it would ellicit some discussion. I majored in evolutionary ecology, so “evolutionary” just-so stories tend to ring true to me more than they should.
I’d like to read the original research for myself at some point.
But competition’s also a factor.
If you try to climb the highest peaks to hunt goats on, you could get hurt or killed — which reduces your line’s reproductive fitness. Aiming lower keeps you and yours alive, even though you might not get more goats than mere subsistence-level.
Also remember we have a system of advertisement and publicity that constantly places overambitious goals in front of us every day. If we internalize that hype, we suffer just because we don’t have the money or time to make such efforts. Depression could be seen as a prudent fighting technique against a *society* stressing dangerous overambition. The Beats and the counterculture existed for a reason.…
Don’t know about his findings, but in response to your question, I was actually faced with this decision. I’ve dealt with depression since I hit puberty, but wasn’t diagnosed until my mid-thirties. The meds I was given made me feel a hell of a lot better, but I lost the creative urge. I decided to stick with the depression, med-free, and keep writing. I’ve lived with the choice for six or seven years now, and I know I did the right thing.
Evolutionary psychology is a mixed bag when it comes to documenting a selective functional response for particular human behaviors. Some of the better science is far more basic, analyzing food-gathering behaviors, or altruism. These papers will often be backed up by a thorough analysis with set costs and benefits observed in a rigidly defined experiment. They do not tend to overreach themselves with their conclusions, staying strictly within the bounds established by the results of their experiment.
The other end of the spectrum are the “just so” stories that posit a theoretical explanation for a trait, but then fail to find a historical reason to have adapted that trait. One of the singular flaws that most of these studies have is the suggestion that, “we have it — so it MUST be good for something”. It is always important to remember that organisms are NOT designed for maximal optimality — merely selected for local optima with the historic tools and flesh that they have been endowed with.
An easy criticism of Dr. Nesse’s hypothesis would be to note that deleterious alleles can be dragged to fixation in a population if they are linked to another beneficial trait whose positive aspects outweigh the negative drag created by the deleterious allele. More critically, some traits are environmentally-dependent, and if the triggering conditions for a negative allele are low in frequency, then that allele may increase in frequency through random drift until the negative pairing finally occurs.
Hell, I haven’t even touched on hybrid vigor. Carrying /some/ of the genes for depression may help to harden an individual against trauma, but carrying all of them or more than a critical threshold may be incapacitating and terminal for the individual.
Finally, it is important to note that depression may well be a post-selectional illness, like cancer. Once an organism has successfully reproduced, and their relative fitness when compared with peers is not terribly different, it does not matter what happens to them. True, the “extended phenotype” observed in social organisms where a parent can continue to provide for offspring well beyond the birthing event suggests that a parent suffering from depression might be less helpful for their offspring than one not plagued by mental illness… but if the relative fitness between the two is not significantly different?
I have to agree with Derksen, especially about post-selectional illnesses. Something I learned in my basic biology class is that if an allele doesn’t prevent you from making babies (or first getting old enough to make babies) then it is likely to continue. Depression doesn’t do very much to stymie sexual selection, either. There are many many many people who are attractive to “the brooding person in the corner.“
While some instances of depression do lead to suicide, I would guess that it doesn’t happen at a high enough rate to stop people from procreating. Nor does it necessarily tie into a particular set of genes that could get easily selected against.
Additionally, there’s probably a fair amount of the environmental dependency there. Someone who genetically tends to be depressed but has a good group of friends/family/community and resources can function quite well — definitely well enough to procreate and see offspring to viability. Someone who genetically doesn’t tend towards depression but who has limited resources, an unstable, undependable community and etc. might have serious problems from the depression caused by very real sets of conditions.
One more thing: the Economist article didn’t mention the links between depression, anxiety and stress. The idea of “unobtainable goals” or “overambitious goals” is too vague, I think, since what I think he’s referring to isn’t the usual “I’m gonna be an astronaut” type of goals but rather the “I will somehow escape from the randomly applied painful shock therapy that I can’t predict or control” kind of goals. The anxiety caused by dealing with that kind of stress is far, far, far more deleterious to ones health than depression and just taking the treatment is. If there’s any benefit from depression, it’s first action isn’t going to lead to giving up ambitious goals, but rather it might lead to giving up on the idea of changing harmful and uncontrollable environmental conditions that make one anxious. To make that a shorter sentence, depression saves us from the harm of being in a long-term state of anxiety.
Anyway, trying to find a “benefit” from depression, especially one related to the historical survival of our species, may be an overly ambitious goal.