Does depression have an upside? Is there some sort of evolutionary advantage for a person to become depressed, for instance, to re-evaluate their lives or perhaps a choice they made that led to their current depression?
Most people who are depressed certainly wouldn’t think so. (I don’t either.) But it doesn’t stop evolutionary psychologists and other researchers from positing that there may indeed be some sort of evolutionary reason for it. Richard Friedman, MD, writing in the New York Times today, explores the issue.
Other researchers have found that sad subjects were better judges of deception than happy ones. Evolutionary psychologists suggest that perhaps the rumination of people who have depression is an adaptive strategy to solve a painful problem.
But research on this issue is nearly always done on college students, and not even depressed ones at that. That certainly limits the generalizeability of their results, and doesn’t necessarily translate into a better understanding of depression as experienced by people who are actually clinically depressed.
It’s a conclusion Dr. Friedman eventually comes to as well. Even if there’s some “point” to depression, it no longer seems to serve the evolutionary advantage it might have once did.
Regardless of its evolutionary purpose, depression remains a serious but eminently treatable mental disorder. Our minds try to justify life problems in a million different ways. However, none of it helps for us to actually treat the problem in the here and now of people’s personal lives.