We've Got Depression All Wrong. It's Trying to Save Us

Depression was my soul's reaction to about 16 years of systematic abuse, emotional neglect, ridicule and bullying. My intellect finally shut down and I withdrew from reality entirely, or at least that was the goal.

At the time my new abuser would ask things like what I was thinking. This was a novelty for me but she was probably trying to figure out ways to torment me more effectively. She also explained that I was trying to hide by sleeping all the time. One teacher wrote a note about my laziness, and I knew he was correct.

Depression wasn't my fault, and it wasn't within my capacity to recover from it. But my family turned it into something exclusively my responsibility. I was drugged over and over; I was permitted to leave home without any means of support or homemaking skills, and I was eventually discarded by means of restraining orders and physical assaults, so I left the state.

If a child is depressed then the worst thing to do is blame, medicate, and isolate them with individual treatment. My counselor encouraged morally reprehensible behavior and never questioned my home life.

If your child is depressed then you'd better consider their environment and social networks to be suspect. If you can't identify problems, then YOU ARE the problem and you'll need to address that with decisive action, in a practical and honest manner.

> Sometimes the threat is so bad or goes on for so long, that the nervous system decides there is no way to fight or to flee. At that point, there is only one option left: immobilization.

Gabor Maté has expressed a similar sentiment in regards to ADHD. According to him, when you encounter stress while both fight and flight are not an option, the only option left is for your mind to distract itself.

Gabor Maté on Rogan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jQSOSi2DA8&t=133s

> It is time that we start honoring the courage and strength of depressed people. It is time we start valuing the incredible capacity of our biology to find a way in hard times. And it is time that we stop pretending depressed people are any different than anyone else.

The article's conclusion ends in a call for society to change its ways. Such an appeal is easy to make. What's not so easy is telling a depressed person what to do right now under the circumstance that society hasn't changed and likely isn't going to change.

The article seems to just be a call to change how society views depression. But is there any science here? The premise that depression is not a deviation from normal functioning, but rather a biologically rooted response could be applied to any behavior. Indeed, it can be applied to the societal opprobrium towards depressed people, which exists across cultures. Maybe that’s just a biologically rooted response that protects society at large? That’s equally plausible if you posit that just because a psychological phenomenon exists it must serve some function.

I feel that this is exactly what it is. In fact, I've got a two year old journal entry detailing a theory very close to this, that I wrote in the depths of a scorching case of depression.

My depression was preceded by several months of extreme psychological stress and was, in my belief, a result of that.

After getting rid of the source of the stress, and 18 months of anti-depressant medication, I am now much better.

Content behind Clickbait headline:

Depression is a "freeze" reaction to stress, effectively shutting down to avoid triggering a dangerous response from the environment.

To me this seems quite a stretch, and maybe some conflation with "learned helplessness".

In my experience, depression is an irrational fear reaction. When something good happens, the brain suddenly thinks "this is not good, failed, it's worthless, a waste of effort" or "this was a mistake; this is going to end in disaster for me, I shouldn't have done this." It's not adaptive just because it's occasionally a correct prediction by chance.

A more common adaptive reaction to adversity is carefulness/stress: heightened awareness of the world and intense effort to choose safe decisions, and to fantasize ways to escape.

Ok then... why does depression potentially lead to suicide? Is that also adaptive? (stick with me, I'm not being facetious)

Consider the possibility that suicide is an adaptive response by the microbiome. After all, the microbes that colonize our body would survive (and subsequently participate in consuming the body, a process called autolysis). It might be their collective way of saying "this vessel is no longer viable, let's take our chances on the outside". Think of it as a self-destruct button and they're ejecting in the escape pods.

This challenges our ideas about self.

Immobilization, to me, sounds like learned helplessness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness.

2020, judging from the URL.

Some previous discussion in 2020:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25546043

Yeah, uh, ever lived with a depressed person?

You cannot get them to do anything. They only care about how sad they feel and care nothing about the effects their constant bed hiding imposes on all the people around them. It is utterly impossible to get them to treat themselves because... That involves getting out of bed .

The depressive loop in the mind has built in defenses that keep it from being treated. A depressed person often wants to be depressed because they take condition it and don't want to face all the things they could have been doing instead, a sort of procrastination on media steroids.

The best treatment for depression, exercise, involves setting all the micro behaviors that depression uses to perpetuate itself.

yeah it's trying to save us like an allergic reaction is trying to save us

Maybe in the context of hunter-gathering societies, but not today.