Some psychologists believe that suicide and depression are an evolutionary strategy.
It was a terrible time when I didn't want it to happen to anyone. But, oddly enough, my self-destructive behavior may have helped. Towards the end, I gave clues about the situation I was in, which led to an intervention that would lead me to a better situation. I was hospitalized. It scared the hell out of me, revealing a process of suffering that I never wanted to be exposed to again. I started taking my medication again and did whatever it took to keep going to school.
One in six Americans experience major depressive disorder at some point in their lives. That word, “disorder,” refers to how many of us see depression: a depression, a mistake in the system, something that needs to be overcome and left in the past.
However, some psychologists suggest that depression is not a dysfunction, but an evolved mechanism designed to provide a specific set of benefits. And I seriously thought about whether it would benefit me, both in high school and in my later life. If they're right, the way we think about depression also needs an intervention.
Could depression have evolved?
There are many theories about the evolutionary function of depression. One of the most popular ideas available is the analytic rumination hypothesis. The idea was most widely circulated in 2009, when Paul Andrews, an evolutionary psychologist at McMaster University, and J. J. McMaster, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia's Student Health Services, joined the study. It was described by Anderson Thomson. Andrews reported that the physical and mental symptoms of depression seem to form an organized system. For example, anhedonia, that is, I have no interest or pleasure in many activities. There is an increase in rumination, that is, an obsessive thinking of the source of a person's pain. Certain types of analytical ability increase. A sudden rise occurs in REM sleep, that is, when the brain creates the moment.
Andrews sees these symptoms as non-random variations in which evolutionary design deviates the wrong way. If you look at it thoroughly, why would a collapse create such a simultaneous set of reactions? Andrews suggests that the function of this design is to distract us from the normal preoccupations of life and focus on understanding or solving the underlying problem that triggers the depressive process. For example, a failed relationship. If something goes wrong in your life, you have to make an effort and find a solution. From this point of view, systemic and excessive thinking, which accompanies depression and makes you feel worthless and perceive things in your life very negatively, is necessary to overcome positive illusions in everyday life and focus on problems. In a study of 61 subjects with depression every 4 in 5 people insight, problem solving, and Prevention of future errors, including at least one positive point ruminasyon saw. Steven Hollon, a psychology professor at Vanderbilt University, says:
"Many bouts of depression end spontaneously. It's called spontaneous recovery, and Paul may have an explanation for how it happened. The reason cognitive behavioral and problem-solving therapies can work is because they focus on and accelerate processes that have evolved in just a few weeks, months."
Even suicidal behavior can be a design function. A tiny minority of researchers believe we may have evolved to try to kill ourselves under the right circumstances. Edward Hagen, an anthropologist at Washington State University, is a leading figure among those who supported and spoke for this idea. Hagen, Evolution and Human Behavior (C.N. In the May 2016 issue of the journal Evolution and animal behavior, he presented a current study to support this idea. He and two co-authors, Kristen Sym and Zachary Garfield, set out to find evidence for two models of suicidal behavior that treat suicidal behavior as a strategic behavior.
Inclusive Compliance Model
The first model is called “inclusive harmony” and is based on the concept of the “Selfish Gene”: the most basic unit of reproduction in natural selection is the gene, not the individual organism. As long as your genes can survive on their own, they are not interested in whether you survive to reproduce, and these genes are also present in other people other than you. Thus, if self-sacrifice is of sufficient benefit to the family members with whom it shares many of its genes, it can lead the host organism to do so. Because of this, people try to maximize not only their own harmony, but also that of their relatives. Many parents can just throw themselves in front of a bus to save their children. In addition, in studies related to suicidal ideation, people often say that they do not want to be a burden to others.
Bargaining Model
The second strategic model of suicidal tendencies is the bargaining model, which is based on the concept of” costly message delivery". A colourful example of costly messaging is the male peacock. The cost of having a large and eye-catching tail is high because it both means a waste of energy and attracts hunters. But the healthier the male peacock, the lower it costs to have a large tail, meaning that large tails give female peacocks a message of being genetically healthy. They are attractive because they are expensive, not because they are expensive. Costly messages can convey a need as well as being healthy. Take fledgling birds, for example. If their mother is right next to them, they do not need to chirp, and already chirp has a high cost, as it attracts hunters to them. But the hungrier or sicker a baby bird is, the less it has to lose by eating, and the more it has to gain by feeding. So chirping louder gives a really big message of need for food, and the mother reacts as well. (Anthropologists and psychiatrists have long considered suicide attempts as cries for help, but treat these attempts as pathological forms of seeking help, not as the result of context-dependent and cost-benefit analyses.) The goal of suicidal tendencies in the inclusive adaptation model is death, and in the bargaining model-aid. It is critical that the overwhelming majority of suicide attempts do not result in death.
Which One Is Real?
Studying these models, Hagen and his colleagues analyzed 474 ethnographic records describing suicidal behavior in 53 different cultures in various parts of the world in order to find a clue as to whether each model was consistent or inconsistent. In support of the claim of inclusive harmony, in one of every 3 cultures, there were records depicting the suicide victim being seen as a burden to other people. In a few records, the victim had low reproductive potential (due to old age or poor health), and in a few, the condition of the victim's relatives was described as improving after the event of death. But in numerous recordings that conflict with the model, the condition of family members had worsened, and many victims were healthy.
In support of the bargaining model, those who attempted suicide were mostly healthy; attempts were in front of other people, failed, and often resulted in a person's interest. The three observations were quite significant: first, the victims were often subjected to a compelling event, such as the loss of a wife or resources. The likelihood of suicide being attempted again in the long term in this case depended on how other people reacted. Second, the victims were generally personally powerless. Third, they were often in conflict with the people around them and in search of a bargaining tool. If recovered, the victims sought help to deal with a serious problem, but could not find it. Researchers present a 1958 study with people in Papua New Guinea as a prominent example:
A suicide attempt is punishable by the beating of a woman by the man who is her patron. Situation: the girl is forced to marry a man she does not like. He attempts suicide several times to prevent marriage. Either it's saved from the river, or it's taken from a place where the river is shallow. Conclusion: The Girl is severely beaten after each suicide attempt. And because he doesn't stop trying, his father and brother consent to the girl marrying Jok, the person she loves.
Hagen and his colleagues concluded that the overarching adjustment and bargaining models associated with suicidal tendencies were both valid. Matthew K. Nock, an expert in suicide and self-mutilation at Harvard University says:
"Hagen put forward really interesting and convincing theoretical models that fit with the available data. These, in turn, can help explain suicidal behavior, which has long been a mystery in the field, from an evolutionary point of view."
According to the evidence in the article, neither model fully explains the phenomenon. Evolutionary theories are strong, but they may have a slippery floor. But several other studies also support the bargaining model to some extent.
For example, this model predicts that depression, a leading risk factor in suicide, will often be used as a bargaining tool when other people react accordingly. A 1987 study found that measuring how problematic people were with their social environment could predict their own levels of depression, but this prediction was only true in people who thought their social networks normally helped them. Another 1997 study also found that women who had recently had abortions reported higher levels of depression and anxiety when they clashed with their mothers or friends, but this was only true in those who said their mothers or friends were more supportive of them than usual. If people around you don't care, responding to social conflicts with depression doesn't work. Depression can be a bargaining chip that jeopardizes the survival of the person and the genes of those who depend on it, which should be important for anyone who benefits from the person being healthy.
The bargaining model may also help to understand why women are about twice as likely to be depressed as men. Hagen and Tom Rosenström, a psychologist at the University of Helsinki, analyzed data on 4,192 American adults in a study conducted by the CDC and still ongoing, in a paper they published in 2016. Their hypothesis was that, unlike women who used depression in social conflicts, men who were physically stronger than women used anger as a bargaining tactic. People who had more physical strength were less likely to become depressed, the data showed. Moreover, when the researchers extracted the effect of physical strength from the statistical relationship, they found that men and women were equally prone to depression. Hagen wrote about making posts costly in the context of postpartum depression: loss of interest in a mother's or baby's health can be an advantage; in this way sufficiently helpful non-peer or social, you can gain the help of the community. Depression can become a tool –consciously or unconsciously - for those who cannot find the support they need.
What Does It All Mean?
So what should we do based on these evolutionary models of depression? Hagen says:
"I'm not comfortable giving advice based on my theories, because that means my theories are correct, in which case we take this information out of the lab and apply it clinically. I don't think it's come to that yet."
He also adds that if his theories are correct, the whole picture cannot be fully seen. Because depression is not something that can be easily overcome. Treatment for depression requires resolving serious conflicts between you and your family, where there are no obvious good or bad guys. In the context of therapy, clinical researchers should also engage patients ' families and fight problems together, but most of them already do. “A lot of what I'm saying is not very radical things in practice, " Hagen said."he says.
Still, these theories shed new light on traditional practices about depression. If depression is a strategic response that we perform consciously or unconsciously, is there any logic in suppressing its symptoms with things like antidepressant use? Hagen sees antidepressants as painkillers, considers it unethical for a doctor to prescribe painkillers for a broken wrist and not cast the wrist. You have to solve the underlying problem. Hagen is saddened that the DSM (psychiatric diagnostic manual) has completely excluded life conditions –even grief caused by the death of a relative - from the diagnostic criteria of major depressive disorder without exception. This removal was done as part of an effort to make the diagnosis more objective and scientific, focusing experts on observed symptoms rather than causes.
But depression often develops as a result of the obvious events that lead to it. Ignoring causality also allows many appropriate patient responses to be categorized as disorders, which leads to the conclusion that depression is seen as a depression rather than a strategic, evolved response. Antidepressant medication can positively change a patient's mood, but in this process it prevents the patient from resolving underlying conflicts and thus further correcting their mood in the long term. Depression doesn't usually occur for no reason. It is mostly a reaction to challenging life events; in 80 percent of cases it appears after significant life events. For example, a woman was found to be 20 times more likely to develop depression in the month following the death of a close relative.
The essence of the Battle of ideas about the function of depression may be that 20 percent part that occurs without a public trigger. Perhaps you can say that there is a reason that is not public, lurking in a person's mind, or hidden in family life. Thomas Joiner of Florida State University, an expert on suicide, says:
"As depressive processes recur, it can be increasingly difficult to know what triggers it, but it is usually out there somewhere. It can be triggers, memories, things like that."
But you can always highlight something in your past, such as being ridiculed by you in the playground, as a situation with potential spiritual consequences. In this case, it would be close to impossible to objectively test the hypothesis that depression is an appropriate response to stressful situations.
Another warning is needed. Even if depression has evolved over the ages as a useful tool, that doesn't make it useful today. We may have evolved to crave sugar and fat, but this adaptation has wrongly adapted to the abundance of calories in our modern environment, leading to an obesity epidemic. Depression can be a condition that has adapted incorrectly. Hagen acknowledges that we have lived with our relatives for most of our evolution, spending most of today with people willing to intervene in our lives, but that depressive processes have reached rapid solutions in this case. Today, we are isolated. We're moving from city to city, living with people who don't have much interest in our reproductive health. In this way, our depressive messages are ignored, then accumulate and turn into consistent, severe dysfunction.
A Finnish study shows that urbanization and modernization have increased over the past two centuries, along with rising suicide rates. This does not mean that depression-even if it has been so before - is no longer functional. Only in the modern world does it seem to deviate from its purpose more than we desire. In addition, some cases of depression cannot be explained by evolutionary design. Listening to Prozac and against depression, a psychiatrist at Brown University and the author of two books, Peter Kramer, depression or negative thinking patterns learned during previous shifts at least some genetic errors that it looks like it stems from unresolved says. Many sources, including Hagen, agree that depression is not just a disease that is the only cause.
On the contrary, even if depression and suicidal tendencies today have a specific purpose, it does not necessarily mean that they have evolved to do so. Randolph Nesse, a psychiatrist and director of the Center for Evolution and Medicine at Arizona State University, considers this possibility with the bargaining model in mind:
"Some people use the threat of suicide to manipulate others, which is similar to the threat of murder or the threat of revealing secrets. But I don't see them as specific adaptations shaped by natural selection. These are just some of the countless ways people use to influence others..."
Nesse sees suicide's inclusive compliance model even less plausible:
"There are many examples where animals sacrifice themselves for their relatives, but I don't see suicide as one of them. They don't leave everything behind. From a broader perspective, there's something useful about low mood, a key that can make it better. I wish more psychiatrists would accept that."
It is clear that evolutionary models have not won the hearts of the psychiatric community. Thomson says:
"Psychiatry, my specialty, still treats depression as just a disease."
The limitations of Health Insurance have forced many psychiatrists away from speech therapy and to write prescriptions that are more effective. Thomson says of this:
"There is a huge investment on an institutional and scientific basis in seeing depression as just a disease model. I tell my colleagues that they start medication even when they shouldn't. This is not good news."
If Thomson, Hagen and others are right that evolution has shaped us strategically to become depressed, then our treatment strategies need to change. Hagen sees depression as a social problem, not a medical one. Andrews and his colleague Paul Watson described the social orientation hypothesis, a theory that includes a version of the bargaining model, in a paper published in 2002. They say:
"Maybe it's best not to write medicine, but to use the miserable but probably adaptable magic of depression, under protective supervision, on the social network."
In this way, it becomes clear that much more attention will be paid to environmental conditions and factors.
It's hard to think in informal evolutionary terms about a condition like depression, especially for those who have felt the overwhelming weight of it. I also sometimes regret how productive I could be if I didn't have my own (now manageable) depression. But even these days, I also take into account that my melancholic state can have benefits. It allows me to focus on deeper questions about where I'm going in my life. Even though he made me question the value of everything, or maybe even because he made me question it.