First, distinguish between catatonia and rumination
Jerry Coyne took a look at a hypothesis that depression is an evolutionary adaptation.
in two new papers by Andrews and Thompson. In short, their “analytical rumination hypothesis” (ARH) proposes that the “malady” we call depression is actually an adaptive behavior built into our ancestors by natural selection. When facing difficult social problems, selection is said to have promoted behaviors that make individuals withdraw from life, ceasing to engage in formerly pleasurable activities like socializing, eating, and sex. This is all in the service of rumination: freed from other activities and commitments, the depressed individual is said to analyze the problems that led to depression in the first place, eventually solving them and re-entering society. This is “adaptive” because individuals who lacked the depressive syndrome would not be able to solve their life problems so easily, and would leave fewer offspring than individuals who shut down and ruminated.
Part of what’s so interesting about that is that it’s so strikingly implausible on the face of it. (There’s no surprise ending – Jerry doesn’t say aha but it’s more plausible than it seems, and commenters are nearly unanimous in being unconvinced.) It seems to be pretty common knowledge that depressed thinking is bad thinking – distorted in many ways, and monumentally unhelpful for any kind of functioning. (As Jerry points out, there is the little matter of suicide for instance.) Mind you, depressed people are better than non-depressed people at giving a realistic assessment of their odds of getting in a car crash and the like, and also at avoiding the Lake Wobegon effect – but that seems to be the only accuracy-enhancing payoff. Other than that…depressed thinking is crap! It’s not the kind of thinking that helps people analyze the problems that led to depression in the first place and then solve them. That kind of thinking depends on not being depressed. I’m aware of this just from common or garden bad moods, so I’m also aware the effect must be orders of magnitude worse in real depression. I’m also aware of that from having been around depressed people – they are not humming with useful rumination and problem-solving, to put it mildly.
All this seems too obvious to mention – like saying that rain makes things wet. So…it’s interesting that Andrews and Thompson think it isn’t.
Yes, it is interesting, isn’t it?!
It’s even worse, I’m afraid:
1. They didn’t even use actual depressed people in their experiment. They simulated them by making people Very Sad Pandas thusly – “Mood was manipulated by providing participants with false feedback on the first round . . . mood was maintained with positive music, sad music, or no music.”
That’s pitiful and insulting, and more evidence the authors have no idea what depression means. To them, it’s apparently the feeling you get when someone criticizes the way you played a game of Prisoner’s Dilemma.
2. “It’s not the kind of thinking that helps people analyze the problems that led to depression in the first place and then solve them.” The authors miss the mark here, too. They assume, a priori, that an external event caused the depression. They further assume this alleged event is under the control of the depressed person, if only he can figure out what to do.
By definition, a large number of cases of clinical depression are characterized by a disproportionate, inappropriate malaise. In other words, morbid thinking out of the blue.
Andrews and Thompson are just recapitulating – in sciencey-sounding language – the idiotic folk advice that has forever bedeviled the clinically depressed: “You can just snap out of it if you put your mind to it.”
Having spent time with depressed people, I will add my voice to the idea that depressed people do not think rationally, that they exaggerate their troubles and are incapable of forging simple strategies for dealing with their troubles. In fact, the essence of depression appears to be the incapacity to form strategies for dealing with problems that normal people can deal with.
One of the scariest things about my only brush with depression was not only losing the ability to think clearly and reason my way to a solution, but knowing I couldn’t do so. Realising I’d lost such a fundamental skill (it’s one I pride myself on and rely on) and the resulting mental paralysis frightened me much more than the situation that led to the whole mess in the first place. I had to physically breakdown in order to get out of the situation, and by default gave myself the mental space to recover. There was no thinking involved, good grief.
Oh, and I forgot the main reason the authors’ hypothesis is flawed: depression is Dawkins’s fault.
This is another one of those cases where I commented at Coyne’s blog and it was evidently eaten by spider-monkeys. His filters must really hate me.
Anyway, I was more or less saying exactly this, though I was speaking from my experience with clinical depression. Also, what Kate said.
Is depression just an extreme case of sadness? I have a severe case of social anxiety. Let me tell you, it is not very adaptive!! But anxiety in certain situations is very useful. I think the same of sadness. If a loved one dies and you are happy about it, that will tell other members of the clan/tribe that you are not a good mate/parent/friend. Depression, while probably not adaptive, is most likely not that big of a barrier to reproduction except in cases of suicide. Also, there is probably a difference in how men and women react to depression. Women may try and cultivate more relationships than men do. Women suffering from depression probably have an easier time finding a partner than men with depression. They may also think a partner or child will bring them happiness. That’s why it won’t go away. It’s passed on from one generation to another without being selected for and some unlucky people have an innate tendency towards it. Have there been any studies on the reproductive output of depressed vs. non-depressed people? I’m certainly no expert, so I could be way off.
Well, Jason, everything you just speculated about was just that – speculation. Which is fine because, as you say, you aren’t an expert. In contrast, Andrews and Thompson are supposed to be experts on depression – or at least they are pretending to some sort of expertise by not only publishing a paper on the subject, but also suggesting the possibility that we should change how we treat depression. The problem is, their entire paper is also little more than speculation, and pretty amateurish speculation at that: This isn’t about Jerry Coyne being smarter than Andrews and Thompson – although in my judgment he certainly is. Rather, the problem is A&T’s utter failure to meet the minimum standards of basic scientific competence: They never subjected their ill-informed speculations to the sort of serious critical questions that scientists are REQUIRED to ask themselves if what they are doing is to deserve the name science. Coyne’s two posts discussed several of those failures, and I could add a more (such as their abject failure to even consider, let alone eliminate, alternate hypotheses for the few bits of actual evidence they present).
In fact, I think you frame the issues and ask better critical questions than Andrews & Thompson appear to have done: For example, you started by asking whether depression is just a severe case of sadness. That’s a good question. The answer, according to all the current scientific literature, is an unequivocal NO – but A&T appear not to have even asked the question in any serious way, and to have assumed without any real evidence (but with some hand-waving) that the answer was yes.
*sigh*
I’m with Jerry Coyne that there is some good stuff done in the general field of evolutionary psychology – but most of it is absolute crap. Every time I see another example, I’m reminded of Chris Clarke’s biting satire of some of the worst offenders: If bad scientists were more self-aware and capable of shame, this one blog post would have left David Buss, Randy Thornhill and their ilk would have quit the field long ago.
If I were to judge by my philosopher friends, I would have to conclude that depression is by far most prominent among philosophers. I could even speculate that this is because we have an incredible ability to analyze things to the last smallest tiny detail, without then being able to find the “final solution.” This is OK in philosophy, where it’s fine to let things “undone” and have other people take on the problems from where you left them of. But it’s not OK in real life: you get stuck literally forever on a problem that most people find ridiculous. “Just move on,” they tell you, and they just don’t understand that you CANNOT move on until you’ve solved it, and it doesn’t help that you KNOW that it can’t be solved. This is my experience of depression, anyway. It doesn’t seem terribly adaptive to me, but it might share a “skill” needed for doing analytic philosophy. *Sigh*
So, brain chemistry evolved through a ‘no pain no gain’ game? The final paragraph made me scream:
Treatment of depression should not go for the “quick fix” of antidepressants. . .
“. . .learning how to endure and utilize emotional pain may be part of the evolutionary heritage of depression, which may explain venerable philosophical traditions that view emotional pain as the impetus for growth and insight into oneself and the problems of life.” (p. 645).
Reading this infuriates. Evolutionary heritage? What the HELL does that mean? I don’t need no stinkin’ evolutionary heritage. I’m content with whatever I got by luck at the moment of evolution I was born in, except when my lizard brain wants to crush heads off people who say things like “evolutionary heritage.” How in the world would it be adaptive to know about, be cast back into, and subsequently suffer through our evolutionary heritage? That’s what we have ancestors and proto-humans for.
The authors need to be slapped. They come off as quite detached from the real suffering of people with depression, who can’t think straight or gain insights or even retrieve items from their own lexicons while they are miserably ruminating.
I skimmed the original article, and I’m w/G. Felis. I am not sure, to be honest, whether the authors did very much research of their own on the topic. The paper is getting attention as if it reported findings. But it’s actually a hypothesis with speculation about paradoxes (carefully selected) that might bolster their hypothesis. I know little about Psychological Review but wonder how this piece was refereed, and what went on during the two years between submission and acceptance of revisions.
“I’m content with whatever I got by luck at the moment of evolution I was born in”
Exactly! Better living through chemistry and all the rest of it, that’s what I say.
G. Felis – Like I said I’m no expert, but a quick google search did find some books that say depression is a severe form of sadness. There’s a book by biologist Lewis Wolpert called Malignant Sadness (sorry I don’t know how to italicize on this computer). He says depression is to sadness what cancer is to healthy cells. I haven’t read the book though. So, what exactly is the difference between sadness and depression besides the duration and whether or not it is caused by an external event?
I know all I was doing was speculating. I agree the argument presented in the paper is junk. A just so story if you will. My just so story is that depression is a by-product of sadness rather than an adaptation in itself. Just like my severe anxiety is a by-product of a normal amount of anxiety (whatever that is). If sadness as an emotion did not exist, I doubt depression would exist. But, I’m not dogmatic about it. Where can I find studies that rule out depression as a pathological form of sadness?
I don’t want to defend these authors because they’re pretty clearly off base if we’re talking about clinical depression instead of mild ennui. Still, I should point out that if we leave open the idea that it’s an internally caused phenomenon (JoshS, you do this in your second remark) then the question naturally arises as to whether or not it’s evolutionary in origin. So what might that be? I think we might as well think about it, even if just for fun.
IIUtC, the authors seemingly link task failure to inhibition, and inhibition to prudence; and by linking inhibition to depression; ergo, they jump the shark by linking depression to prudence. This is a fantastical conclusion; it’s like concluding that we should be afraid of housecats, because certainly we should be afraid of tigers, and tigers and housecats are both feline.
From the outset we have to observe that, whatever the survival benefits of something related to depression might be, clinical depression itself cannot be beneficial. It leads to suicidal thoughts and inclinations (and hence suicide); and the dead don’t reproduce. This ought to be written in big, neon letters in the authors’ minds: depression moots evolution. But then that just makes the existence of depression all the more puzzling.
Maybe there are some murky intuitions that suggest there must be some kind of link between inhibition and depression. We might observe that there is a special case of inhibition called learned helplessness, where the mere desire to perform goals that reduce pain are pre-empted by behaviorist adaptation to the environment. If this outlook is internalized, then it is not incredible to link inhibition to anhedonism through learned helplessness. And sure enough, anhedonism is a trait that we find in those who are clinically depressed.
Maybe this has an analogue in evolution. At any given stage of evolution, we might find changes in an environment that are sudden or unexpected. During such stages, natural talents that are positively adapted to the previous environment may prove to be useless or counterproductive in the new one. You would very well expect that the population of persons being left behind would encounter constant failures in pursuit of the goals that they had previously taken for granted. Constant failure with respect to goals that are central to the person’s repertoire of adaptively positive talents is a milder case of learned helplessness. (Though of course this isn’t necessarily limited to talents that might cross generations, but also to skills, which can be learned within a single generation. But we might plausibly suppose that talents are more likely to be central to a person’s favorite goals.) Maybe this analogue is a long shot, or falls short of leading to clinical depression, but at least it doesn’t seem crazy to me.
Another hypothesis might be what I would call the “ship of fools” theory. When you become convinced that the society you live in is full of idiots, i.e., people who are complete wackjobs that are going to get us all killed, then you will do whatever you can to run away. When Pompeii is about to explode, the prudent man does not sit around politely discussing the ins and outs of relocation logistics with his neighbors if they’re not convinced. He runs away. That would explain the antisocial element. And then learned helplessness emerges when one comes to understand that, in the present-day world, there is simply nowhere left to run.
I lived with a depressive once and one thing that was most noticeable was that he couldn’t cope with thinking his way through his problems at all. That was why he was depressed, because he said it was like being down a deep well with no way out. As depressives are terrible black holes to live with – they suck the energy away – I can’t see how his depressive state made him a more attractive mate. In fact it took away a good deal of what had attracted me to him in the first place.
So does evolutionary psychology say that everything we do is “adaptive behaviour built into our ancestors by natural selection?” How does it explain stuff like reading books, or blogging, which takes up a lot of my time, and a lot of the other people’s on this site?
I completely agree that depression, at least as I experience it, has absolutely nothing to do with the ability to analyze problems successfully. It’s the EXACT opposite, and the most maladaptive psychological trait I can think of.
But I still disagree with this: “It leads to suicidal thoughts and inclinations (and hence suicide); and the dead don’t reproduce.”
It seems to me that this counterargument would only make sense if most depressed people would end up killing themselves before they could even reproduce – but obviously, that’s far from the truth. Am I missing something?
Tea, although I might be mistaken, it seems to me that in the long run and at the level of populations, the inclination would work to disfavor depression for that reason.
Though even if we’re not convinced of the suicide-depression connection, the anhedonism-depression connection is equally significant for natural selection, one would think, since that has an impact on prospects for reproduction.
People are right to be skeptical, but there’s a few points which could be made here.
First of all, there are many examples of sickle cell-type genes where having one allele confers an advantage while having two alleles makes the gene dangerous. It’s not particularly unlikely that this would be the case with depressive or thinking as well.
Another is that negative emotions and the ability to focus on negative emotions are objectively adaptive in many ways. I just read a science article in the NYT about the appearance of guilt during child development. The upshot was that children have two ways of learning to suppress undesirable behaviors — self control and guilt. Children without much self control do not necessarily have a lot of problems learning to behave appropriately providing they have a healthy guilt response that makes them feel bad when they’ve behaved inappropriately. Built-in negative feedbacks are definitely part of many biological systems, and the reason is because they’re often adaptive.
That said, any such claims about depression or any other sort of behavioral disorder is suspect given the current lack of clarity on brain function.
Yes but depression is much more than just a “negative” emotion. I don’t think anyone has claimed that no “negative” emotion can be adaptive – but depression goes way beyond mere sadness or melancholy or guilt.
When I was an adolescent, several centuries ago, depression was colloquially used to mean just a slightly low mood; my friends and I liked to announce now and then, in a self-mocking way, ‘Oh, I’m sooo deee-PRESSED.’ But it was the teenagery low spirits we were talking about – not real depression – which I know only from hearsay and external observation, but that’s more than enough to show me that our teenage version was not in the same ballpark.
Of course, I agree that depression is not just a simple negative emotion — it almost certainly involves complexes of negative emotions, memories, and other neural constructs.
Again, I was suggesting that depression could be caused by a sickle cell type adaptation that becomes disadvantageous when too many of the same genes are present, or too many of this type and too few of this type…I’m certainly not suggesting that depression is just a bad feeling.
Then again, the problem of other minds prevents us from definitively determining the difference between the experience of a depressive person and a person merely in a bad mood. Whether it’s a difference of degree or a difference of kind — it’s still hard to say. Maybe it’s neither; maybe it’s a difference in response to the very same emotions. Maybe there’s some sort of research that rules some or all of these possibilities out, but I haven’t heard of it.
From the sound of it, though, the study may just not have been clear that they meant emotional depression rather than clinical depression.
Sorry, I should have actually read Coyne’s bit before commenting. Yeah, looks like this study is trash, though I would say the idea itself is not beyond the pale. However, we have nowhere near enough insight into the workings of the mind or brain to come to any of the conclusions the authors attempt to jump to.