What If We’re Wrong About Depression?
He doesn’t believe all cases of depression are triggered by problems that need to be solved. “Depression is not like a single trait,” he said. “It’s really a series of multiple traits that have in common sadness and anhedonia.” But, he added, research shows that many people with depression can point to troubles that they believe brought it on.
And if in fact depression is at least in part an adaptation meant to help us deal with difficult problems, he thinks this could have big implications for the way we diagnose it.
.. WILL THINKING OF DEPRESSION as an adaptive trait end up changing how we treat it? Steven Hollon, a professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, thinks it’s an interesting possibility. “Most things that don’t serve a useful purpose tend to drop out along the line, and depression hasn’t,” he told Op-Talk. “You have to wonder if it plays some kind of role.”
Dr. Andrews’s idea of rumination as an aid to problem-solving is “certainly not widely accepted yet,” Dr. Hollon added, “but that doesn’t mean he won’t turn out to be right. And to develop a measure to get at the constructs he has in mind is an absolutely essential step along the way.”
.. The idea that the disorder can help with problem-solving is “one of the more popular psychological theories of the purpose of depression,” he told Op-Talk. But “getting depressed to kind of think through your problems seems to be a pretty high-cost” adaptation, he said, “because depression’s no day at the beach.”
Clinicians who treat depressed people, he added, often find that “they’re ruminative in a way that really is very self-defeating and self-destructive.”
.. His team has experimented with treating depressed patients with an anti-inflammatory drug, and found that those with high levels of a particular blood marker for inflammation improved significantly. “This for us in psychiatry is a first,” he said, “where you can actually measure something in the blood.”