Jonah Lehrer has an interesting article in the NYT magazine about a recent Psych Review article by Paul Andrews and J. Anderson Thomson. The basic claim Andrews and Thomson make in their paper is that depression is “an adaptation that evolved as a response to complex problems and whose function is to minimize disruption of rumination and sustain analysis of complex problems”. Lehrer’s article is, as always, engaging, and he goes out of his way to obtain some critical perspectives from other researchers not affiliated with Andrews & Thomson’s work. It’s definitely worth a read.
In reading Lehrer’s article and the original paper, two things struck me. One is that I think Lehrer slightly exaggerates the novelty of Andrews and Thomson’s contribution. The novel suggestion of their paper isn’t that depression can be adaptive under the right circumstances (I think most people already believe that, and as Lehrer notes, the idea traces back a long way); it’s that the specific adaptive purpose of depression is to facilitate solving of complex problems. I think Andrews and Thomson’s paper received a somewhat critical reception (which Lehrer discusses) not so much because people found the suggestion that depression might be adaptive objectionable, but because there are arguably more plausible things depression could have been selected for. Lehrer mentions a few:
Other scientists, including Randolph Nesse at the University of Michigan, say that complex psychiatric disorders like depression rarely have simple evolutionary explanations. In fact, the analytic-rumination hypothesis is merely the latest attempt to explain the prevalence of depression. There is, for example, the “plea for help“ theory, which suggests that depression is a way of eliciting assistance from loved ones. There’s also the “signal of defeat“ hypothesis, which argues that feelings of despair after a loss in social status help prevent unnecessary attacks; we’re too busy sulking to fight back. And then there’s “depressive realism“: several studies have found that people with depression have a more accurate view of reality and are better at predicting future outcomes. While each of these speculations has scientific support, none are sufficient to explain an illness that afflicts so many people. The moral, Nesse says, is that sadness, like happiness, has many functions.
Personally, I find these other suggestions more plausible than the Andrews and Thomson story (if still not terribly compelling). There are a variety of reasons for this (see Jerry Coyne’s twin posts for some of them, along with the many excellent comments), but one pretty big one is that is that they’re all at least somewhat more consistent with a continuity hypothesis under which many of the selection pressures that influenced the structure of the human mind have been at work in our lineage for millions of years. That’s to say, if you believe in a “signal of defeat” account, you don’t have to come up with complex explanations for why human depression is adaptive (the problem being that other mammals don’t seem to show an affinity for ruminating over complex analytical problems); you can just attribute depression to much more general selection pressures found in other animals as well.
One hypothesis I particularly like in this respect, related to the signal-of-defeat account, is that depression is essentially just a human manifestation of a general tendency toward low self-confidence and aggression. The value of low self-confidence is pretty obvious: you don’t challenge the alpha male, so you don’t get into fights; you only chase prey you think you can safely catch; and so on. Now suppose humans inherited this basic architecture from our ancestral apes. In human societies there’s still a clear potential benefit to being subservient and non-confrontational; it’s a low-risk, low-reward strategy. If you don’t bother anyone, you’re probably not going to get the girl impress the opposite sex very much, but at least you won’t get clubbed over the head by a competitor very often. So there’s a sensible argument to be made for frequency dependent selection for depression-related traits (the reason it’s likely to be frequency dependent is that if you ever had a population made up entirely of self-doubting, non-aggressive individuals, being more aggressive would probably become highly advantageous, so at some point, you’d achieve a stable equilibrium).
So where does rumination–the main focus of the Andrews and Thomson paper–come into the picture? Well, I don’t know for sure, but here’s a pretty plausible just-so story: once you evolve the capacity to reason intelligently about yourself, you now have a higher cognitive system that’s naturally going to want to understand why it feels the way it does so often. If you’re someone who feels pretty upset about things much of the time, you’re going to think about those things a lot. So… you ruminate. And that’s really all you need! Saying that depression is adaptive doesn’t require you to think of every aspect of depression (e.g., rumination) as a complex and human-specific adaptation; it seems more parsimonious to see depressive rumination as a non-adaptive by-product of a more general and (potentially) adaptive disposition to experience negative affect. On this type of account, ruminating isn’t actually helping a depressed person solve any problems at all. In fact, you could even argue that rumination shouldn’t make you feel better, or it would defeat the very purpose of having a depressive nature in the first place. In other words, it’s entirely consistent with the basic argument that depression is adaptive under some circumstances that the very purpose of rumination might be to keep depressed people in a depressed state. I don’t have any direct evidence for this, of course; it’s a just-so story. But it’s one that is, in my opinion (a) more plausible and (b) more consistent with indirect evidence (e.g., that rumination generally doesn’t seem to make people feel better!) than the Andrews and Thomson view.
The other thing that struck me about the Andrews and Thomson paper, and to a lesser extent, Lehrer’s article, is that the focus is (intentionally) squarely on whether and why depression is adaptive from an evolutionary standpoint. But it’s not clear that the average person suffering from depression really cares, or should care, about whether their depression exists for some distant evolutionary reason. What’s much more germane to someone suffering from depression is whether their depression is actually increasing their quality of life, and in that respect, it’s pretty difficult to make a positive case. The argument that rumination is adaptive because it helps you solve complex analytical problems is only compelling if you think that those problems are really worth mulling over deeply in the first place. For most of the things that depressed people tend to ruminate over (most of which aren’t life-changing decisions, but trivial things like whether your co-workers hate you because of the unfashionable shirt you wore to work yesterday), that just doesn’t seem to be the case. So the argument becomes circular: rumination helps you solve problems that a happier person probably wouldn’t have been bothered by in the first place. Now, that isn’t to say that there aren’t some very specific environments in which depression might still be adaptive today; it’s just that there don’t seem to be very many of them. If you look at the data, it’s quite clear that, on average, depression has very negative effects. People lose friends, jobs, and the joy of life because of their depression; it’s hard to see what monumental problem-solving insight could possibly compensate for that in most cases. By way of analogy, saying that depression is adaptive because it promotes rumination seems kind of like saying that cigarettes serve an adaptive purpose because they make nicotine withdrawal go away. Well, maybe. But wouldn’t you rather not have the withdrawal symptoms to begin with?
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that we should view depression solely in pathological terms, and should entirely write off the possibility that there are some potentially adaptive aspects to depression (or personality traits that go along with it). Rather, the point is that, if you’re suffering from depression, it’s not clear what good it’ll do you to learn that some of your ancestors may have benefited from their depressive natures. (By the same token, you wouldn’t expect a person suffering from sickle-cell anemia to gain much comfort from learning that they carry two copies of a mutation that, in a heterozygous carrier, would confer a strong resistance to malaria.) Conversely, there’s a very real danger here, in the sense that, if Andrews and Thomson are wrong about rumination being adaptive, they might be telling people it’s OK to ruminate when in fact excessive rumination could be encouraging further depression. My sense is that that’s actually the received wisdom right now (i.e., much of cognitive-behavioral therapy is focused on getting depressed individuals to recognize their ruminative cycles and break out of them). So the concern is that too much publicity might be a bad thing in this case, and, far from heralding the arrival of a new perspective on the conceptualization and treatment of depression, may actually be hurting some people. Ultimately, of course, it’s an empirical matter, and certainly not one I have any conclusive answers to. But what I can quite confidently assert in the meantime is that the Lehrer article is an enjoyable read, so long as you read it with a healthy dose of skepticism.
Andrews, P., & Thomson, J. (2009). The bright side of being blue: Depression as an adaptation for analyzing complex problems. Psychological Review, 116 (3), 620-654 DOI: 10.1037/a0016242