What are the Evolutionary Benefits of Depression? (8-26-21)

https://www.amazon.com/Loss-Sadness-Psychiatry-Transformed-Depressive-ebook/dp/B001CHRHHO/r

"Depression has become the single most commonly treated mental disorder, amid claims that one out of ten Americans suffer from this disorder every year and 25% succumb at some point in their lives. Warnings that depressive disorder is a leading cause of worldwide disability have been accompanied by a massive upsurge in the consumption of antidepressant medication, widespread screening for depression in clinics and schools, and a push to diagnose depression early, on the basis of just a few symptoms, in order to prevent more severe conditions from developing.

In The Loss of Sadness, Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield argue that, while depressive disorder certainly exists and can be a devastating condition warranting medical attention, the apparent epidemic in fact reflects the way the psychiatric profession has understood and reclassified normal human sadness as largely an abnormal experience."

"Intensely sad people experience decreased initiative, find less pleasure in life to motivate them, and tend to withdraw from everyday activities. Positive mood, in contrast, encourages activities required to obtain sexual partners, food, shelter, and other resources that increase survival and reproduction. Thus, under ordinary circumstances, consistent levels of negative mood should be selectively disadvantageous. For intense sadness responses to have been naturally selected, there must have been some special circumstances in which the benefits of temporarily experiencing such symptoms outweighed the obvious costs. In those particular contexts, and only in those contexts, states of low mood must have increased fitness precisely because they made people less active, less motivated, and so on. The best analogy is to acute pain from an injury, which stops activity but is adaptive because it helps people avoid further damage to tissue. In contrast, chronic pain unrelated to any underlying physiological damage would be harmful in the way that depressive disorder is certainly harmful."

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