Does Depression Have Evolutionary Survival Value?
The mystery of depression is not that it exists — the mind, like the flesh, is prone to malfunction. Instead, the paradox of depression has long been its prevalence. While most mental illnesses are extremely rare — schizophrenia, for example, is seen in less than 1 percent of the population — depression is everywhere, as inescapable as the common cold… The persistence of this affliction — and the fact that it seemed to be heritable — posed a serious challenge to Darwin’s…evolutionary theory. If depression was a disorder, then evolution had made a tragic mistake, allowing an illness that impedes reproduction — it leads people to stop having sex and consider suicide — to spread throughout the population…
The alternative, of course, is that depression has a secret purpose and our medical interventions are making a bad situation even worse. Like a fever that helps the immune system fight off infection — increased body temperature sends white blood cells into overdrive — depression might be an unpleasant yet adaptive response to affliction.
Full article on the upside of depression.
Interesting hypothesis. But the article is unconvincing.
I’m with Tom. I’m not sure I buy this.
Suggesting mental illness conveys some type of evolutionary advantage is about as ludicrous as saying heart disease or cancer conveys an evolutionary advantage. The reason many diseases have remained in the gene pool is because they doesn’t tend to occur early enough in life or with severe enough episodes to interferer with reproduction. Maybe the coping mechanisms are varied enough as not to kill off the host (i.e. Darwin focused on work to pull himself out of gloomy moods).
I tend to agree with the article.
You don’t see those happy, perky, know-it-all people inventing new things. They’re simply too happy with the status quo to feel the need to improve their lives. It’s the people who think, “What if life could be better than it is right now?” that get the job done.
I submit that extreme depression is not a natural response. Maybe it’s a Demond Morris-type response (see his books, “The Naked Ape” and “The Human Zoo”). In the state of nature, depression might be a natural reaction to the environment that stimulates innovation and improvement. Furthermore, because survival means chasing one’s food, extreme depression is not possible.
When we exhibit the same response in modern society, the survival imperative does not apply to us, and we have the “luxury” of wallowing in our melancholy. In mild cases, it works in our favor since it still gets us out of bad situations (like the woman who was married to an alcoholic), but extreme cases are allowed to go too far.
It’s similar to Robert Sapolsky’s “Why Zebras Don’t Get Cancer.” The natural response to danger serves us well if we’re being chased by a lion, but when we’re in a modern society, it works against us.
If there were not some sort of evolutionary survival advantage, then why is depression so pervasive?
Excellent points, Virginia.