Given my own experience with depression, it makes some amount of intuitive sense. For me at least, "sadness" is not wrong, but other than that it doesn't describe the experience very well at all.
When I'm really down, I can't bring myself to care about "aversive events". I might even welcome them a little bit, both because they fit my understanding better (everything is proceeding as it should be, this ant eating my flesh makes sense) and because it's an opportunity to feel something at least. For me anyway, depression is more about absence of affect than feeling "sad", and ironically it is maddening (and yet, in a sense I can't bring myself to care.)
Then again, my explanation suggests that depressed people ought to be better at avoiding harm through inaction, and I didn't see that in the abstract?
Another hypothesis is that you could stop at "Depression Reduces Capacity to Learn". It feels like all mental processing is muted, and especially any forms of change. I guess you could do a study where you have to learn to actively prevent an aversive event for someone else. But the 1st hypothesis may still apply: depressed people may still care less about harm to someone else (than if they were not depressed). But at least you could separate out whether it's only because depressed people don't care what happens to themselves.
I experience depression as an autonomous shutdown, under great mental weight.
The ability to make any mental and physical effort is greatly reduced to "depressed" levels.
It is the subconscious version of a situation where you need to climb out of a pit, but the walls are perfectly flat and oiled. Even though you need to get out of the pit, instead of scrambling, you just sit down.
The situation may not really be like that, but some deep cognitive machinery has concluded that it is.
It isn't anything like sadness. Although sadness could be part or proximate cause of a particular depressive episode, it is neither a necessary or sufficient condition.
--
I do believe depression has a real purpose. To turn off motivated but misdirected behavior, and force us to perform a reset of deeply held assumptions, expectations and motivations.
Pain effectively changes our expectations and behavior in the moment. Depression is like pain for complex situations. It forces major change, by disabling our current ineffective directives and giving us "time out" to slowly rewire. Until the subconscious believes we have found a new mental path, more aligned with reality, and lets motivation flow again.
But like battle surgery, it is a blunt instrument for doing something profound, and may inflict damage as well as repair it.
And when life circumstances don't let us take the pause and rest our brain is trying to enforce, it is a bit of living hell.
I agree, sadness is not how I would describe depression. It's more like... a deep sense of apathy, emptiness and hopelessness with no apparent cause or end in sight.
Of course that mental state would hinder learning, you're missing all the brain signals and reward feedback to care about anything.
I think everyone is wired a little differently. I agree that sadness isn’t the right word for it either, apathy and empathy and hopelessness are bang on. But for me, I guess I take refuge in learning. I find it hard to go and do anything physical or social, and the only outlet left is to learn obsessively cause otherwise I’ll lose my mind. Maybe trying to stockpile knowledge for the day when the hopelessness goes away and it’ll end up being useful?
> I find it hard to go and do anything physical or social, and the only outlet left is to learn obsessively cause otherwise I’ll lose my mind.
That's depression's "twin" sister (with a different personality) anxiety taking command of your behaviour. It's well-established now that obsessive-compulsive and avoidance behaviours are linked to anxiety. Both depression and anxiety feed each other.
The authors take a leap in assuming there's a difficulty with overriding a response. But in my and others' experience from group therapy, I can confidently say it's more like either apathy or being numbed out, to the point of either not noticing or caring that the aversive sound is happening.
This is how SSRI has felt for me also, incidentally: an even deeper apathy, setting in from lack of any emotion at all.
This is exactly what you'd expect if the hypothesis that depression is an evolved adaptation for surviving no-win scenarios that can only be waited out holds.
In a scenario where a disaster has negatively affected the primary productivity of the local food web (e.g. volcano, forest fire, bolide, plague or tsunami), the groups of social species that exist in an environment are likely to engage in internal strife until the food web productivity the group subsists on has returned to normality. Phenotypes which reduce activity across the board without making any changes to their distribution of activities, just hoping for things to get better on their own, are likely the phenotypes that are most successful at surviving to reproduce within conditions of intragroup strife when these infrequent disasters occur.
If this line of reasoning bears out to correctly describe the actual selection pressures that have led to the genes for depression evolving, it follows that what we call major depressive disorder is in fact the genome seeing and carrying out false positives for needing the famine-survival strategy.
.
Incidentally, I first came across the theory I'm repeating here on Steven Byrne's neuroscience blog, if you want an avenue for finding sources.
I do like evolutionary explanations for a lot of human behavior, but this one feels a little too pat to me.
Patience, "biding our time", "hunkering down", etc. are actual emotional states we can experience and recognize, and depression doesn't feel even remotely like for most people as far as I'm aware.
Also, this explanation would only really work if the entire group entered a dormant depressed state together. Otherwise, the non-depressed ones would capitalize the tribe's resource and everyone would still end up screwed. But depression doesn't seem to have that sort contagious social component. On the contrary, when someone is depressed, the immediate response by people around them is generally try to "cheer them up" or encourage them to exit that depressed state. And while the depressed person is likely conveying a whole lot of negative sentiment, most aren't actively attempting to get the people around them to be depressed too. That's the last thing most depressed people want.
> I do like evolutionary explanations for a lot of human behavior, but this one feels a little too pat to me.
I agree.
> Patience, "biding our time", "hunkering down", etc. are actual emotional states we can experience and recognize, and depression doesn't feel even remotely like for most people as far as I'm aware.
But I don't think that's a valid counterargument. Depression doesn't need to feel like that or be motivated by that in order to be selected for. As long as it has the same effect as someone actively choosing to reduce consumption, the argument works. (Again, I'm still skeptical of the argument.)
> Also, this explanation would only really work if the entire group entered a dormant depressed state together.
That's valid, though to salvage the argument, you could say it applies to situations where active behavior turns out to be maladaptive. Perhaps fleeing the volcano causes you to inhale more gases and definitely die/fail to reproduce, whereas moping in place gives you a chance to luck out and be in the right place at the right times and thereby survive. That's a stretch, but the other examples are better: maybe the active people compete and kill each other off. Or the active people catch the plague while trying to help out.
Actively avoiding harm might even be the better approach 99% of the time, and yet the 1% where inaction is better means that the trait can survive. Say everyone has an innate x% chance of being active. Event 1: 60% of active people survive, 40% of inactive do. Repeat several times. Event N: the soldiers find and kill 100% of active people and 75% of inactive. The survivors will not have x=100.
Related example: dinosaurs and small mammals. Big things did really well until they didn't.
> On the contrary, when someone is depressed, the immediate response by people around them is generally try to "cheer them up" or encourage them to exit that depressed state.
True, but that is when times are generally good. I doubt people would be "cheer up" in an actual disaster situation.
From what i understand depressed people generally do well in disaster situations because they can still focus on critical tasks without getting overwhelmed by all the other bad stuff going on that isn't an immediate problem. (Possibly that's just a popular conception from movies. No idea if its true)
It is from the movies. Depressed people in disaster situations dont act and frustrated their close ones by being additional burden. Disaster does not cure depression, the issue is still there, just with worst consequences.
> On the contrary, when someone is depressed, the immediate response by people around them is generally try to "cheer them up" or encourage them to exit that depressed state.
An explanation for that behavior is that this kind of reaction serves as protection against the contagion. It doesn’t help the depressed but the environment around them, to not join in and feel the feelings of despair and hopelessness.
According to some theories, depression means other feelings like anger and anxiety are being suppressed - resulting in transference and counter-transference.
There is nothing about evolutionary theory that posits that all current biological structures/functions must have a evolutionary purpose.
Only the system as a whole must carry superior fitness, not each of its individual components. Given a sufficiently complex system, its rather expected that there will be negative, or even outright destructive functions that arise. You can certainly try to find a positive reason for why cancer, disease, death during conception, etc exist, but there is a much simpler explanation.
Depression in this view, isn't something outright that was adaptively constructed, but merely a side effect of how the mind works.
My understanding of the "modern" point of view is that selection acting at the level of the gene (not the organism or group) is sufficient as a theory. The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype go into this stuff in a lot of detail.
Totally agree with your first sentence though. And even if there is a plausible adaptive function it may have only been adaptive in the past, or might be a side effect of some other adaptive function (see sickle cell anemia), or a host of other possibilities.
Have a read about kin selection, for instance. There are lots of facts about e.g social insects (like the male/female/sterile ratio iirc) that were thought to only be explainable by group selection, but later were found to work out purely from considerations of gene selection. I'm just a layperson though, would highly recommend Dawkins writing on this stuff. It's much less polemic than his writing on religion, if that puts you off at all.
I think the basic criticism of group selection is that at an individual level it can be beneficial to go against the group's goal, and you need to explain why that doesn't happen (even very small advantages are rapidly boosted by selection). This is one of the great puzzles of selection - how does cooperation evolve from selfish interests? The theory of group selection just asserts that it does, which is not very satisfactory.
There's behaviour at an individual/group level that is only explained by selection at a lower level. Consider the placenta releasing allocrine hormones during pregnancy while the mother's body increases insulin levels, or consider male lions killing off the cubs of defeated males.
I've often wondered if depression is exactly that, a system level optimization. Sometimes depression just happens, but sometimes it is triggered by low social status, realizing you've hurt someone in an unjustified or accidental way, having other mental illness, being seriously injured, or some other way that threatens the fitness of the overall group. Depression might be a (albeit flawed) system level way of reducing the amount of physical and social resources those people consume so that the non-depressed strata of society can better take them.
Note: this is a speculation, not assertions of fact
I think its just a natural consequence of our mind working on a positive-negative reward system, which I think its critical to any intelligence. Being manically positive is just as detrimental as being chronically depressed.
Its entirely normal to be negative, or to ignore stimuli, or decide not to do things. In some situations, say if you were trapped in a cage your whole life, you'd agree it'd be entirely normal to be depressed. It would make no sense to waste energy running around hitting iron bars that won't break.
In this sense, depression is somewhat of a social construct. We determine someone is depressed because we believe their reaction to the environment to not be normal.
It makes technical sense that if one individual helped for example to make the rest of the colony propgate 3x faster, it would be a collective reproductive advantage
If the genotype is mostly 'expressed' as depression in certain scenarios that allow your kin to reproduce better at the expense of you reproducing worse, that's not necessarily true.
Imagine for a moment, a version of depression that appears after someone gets their reproductive member cut off (perhaps encounter an angry lion?), but they are still around to compete for food with the extended family's children.
The rule of thumb is if something has a cost and persists over time it must have some benefit even if we don’t understand what that is. Otherwise, creatures not paying the cost will outcompete over time.
Context: I dabbled in evolutionary biology at the university level, not enough for even a minor in the subject.
My understanding is the existence of selection does not necessarily mean every trait that exists right now has an evolutionary benefit. It is more coarse grained that anything that doesn’t prevent you from breeding is acceptable. Depressed people are not made infertile by their depression, so there will be a subset of depressed people (assuming depression even has a hereditary component). This doesn’t mean the trait of depression has an advantage in order to exist, it just isn’t so much of a disadvantage that it doesn’t exist.
> the hypothesis that depression is an evolved adaptation for surviving no-win scenarios that can only be waited out holds
I remember from my days studying to be an actuary that the population that can best estimate mortality odds from the gut are actually the depressed. (Most of us tend to be way too optimistic about common risks and pessimistic about uncommon ones.)
This was also used to explain mammalian postpartum depression, when the mother has to make a wretching call as to whether to keep the offspring given its health, her health and the environmental context.
This fits exactly with how depression feels to me, and appears to manifest itself in me behavior-wise, according to my partner. Def going to give this some thought. Thanks!
I can imagine a great many things we collapse to one term because of similarities are in fact distinct, from myriad causes. Cancer is an example. The common cold is diagnosed based on symptoms, but is a reaction to any of several kinds of virus. Hell, a crab or a tree is not one class of things, but many that converged on common solutions.
There’s an ADHD specialist, a neurologist, who wrote a book called “ADHD Does Not Exist”. His core argument is that ADHD is not a single disorder but a collection of symptoms that cluster together from many different underlying causes. https://isbn.nu/9780062266743
My personal experience is that the cost of enduring a negative stimulus is not simply a function of the magnitude of the negative stimulus, but rather the magnitude of the negative stimulus in relation to the magnitude of all other concurrent negative stimuli. This study controls the environment so that a single negative stimulus is isolated and additional external negative stimuli are minimized, but it cannot control for the fact that a depressed person also endures a constant barrage of negative stimuli which are generated internally (hopelessness, exhaustion, fear, self-doubt, etc). The magnitude of these internally generated negative stimuli is likely much larger than that of the aversive external stimulus used in this study, so it seems reasonable that the marginal relief obtained by avoiding the external stimulus may be perceived as relatively negligible, or at least diminished to the point that the cost of avoiding is greater than the cost of enduring.
"These findings suggest that in young adults, depressive symptoms are associated with difficulty in overriding prepotent responses to actively avoid aversive outcomes in the absence of reward."
My word... Could they have phrased that any less clearly?
As I understand it: the more depressive symptoms the subjects showed, the less likely they were to actively avoid bad outcomes (unless there was some other associated reward).
Yep, a sentence only someone on tenure-track could love.
ChatGPT, asked to translate to a high schooler: "Basically, this study found that young people with depression sometimes struggle to break automatic habits, especially when they’re trying to avoid something bad and there isn’t a prize or reward for doing it."
When asked to provide real life examples from the paper conclusion:
Workplace Example
Scenario: An employee has a colleague who tends to send aggressive emails if they don’t receive updates on time.
Healthy Active Avoidance: The employee learns, “If I send a quick status update every morning, I avoid the stress of hostile emails.” They adopt this as a habit.
Depressive Active Avoidance Deficit: A person with depressive symptoms may take longer to make this connection or fail to act even after realizing it. They know sending updates might help, but initiating the behavior feels too effortful or pointless. As a result, they keep receiving stressful emails, reinforcing the feeling of helplessness.
> ChatGPT, asked to translate to a high schooler: "Basically, this study found that young people with depression sometimes struggle to break automatic habits, especially when they’re trying to avoid something bad and there isn’t a prize or reward for doing it."
The translation is just as much of a word salad as the original, just with simpler vocabulary. Worse, it mangles the key point.
Prepotent responses aren't "automatic habits," but overriding responses (e.g. pain) [1]. The "sometimes" qualifier is unsubstantiated when describing "association". And the struggle isn't amplified ("especially") when avoiding something bad absent reward, the first part of the sentence is conditional upon the absence of a reward. (It's nonsense to say pool drownings are especially common in pools.)
> you managed to make it more convoluted than the original
Not relevant. I'm not trying to break down the original text, that was done adequately by the top comment. I'm showing why the LLM summary is nonsense.
The article claimed it is a failure to learn whereas the phrasing from ChatGPT results in a much wider implication. Failure in a struggle to do something could imply a moral failure. If that's the message people get from this research, then there's a real risk it could worsen depression.
Please don't post ChatGPT slop without then going through it with a fine-toothed comb, and checking whether it's correct. (It almost never is, but the criticism can be interesting… in discussion about ChatGPT. Otherwise, it's a derail.)
Your summary claims more than the original you quoted, no?
Example:
Case 1: Subject tries piano sight-reading exercises, if they get less than 80% accuracy a loud annoying horn will blare. Then subject goes again and try to improve the score.
Care 2. Subject tries piano sight-reading exercises, and if they get less than 80% accuracy they get notified that they didn't succeed at the test. Then they go again and try to improve their score.
The article strongly implies depression will make improvement more difficult in case 1 by the amount found in the study. But it doesn't necessarily imply that (or anything strongly) for case 2.
Your summary strongly implies that depression impedes progress in both cases at the same rate as the outcome of the study.
I'm not a domain expert but I'm going to guess "having bad outcomes" is as poor a paraphrase of "overriding prepotent responses" here as "having functions" would be to characterize functional programming languages.
I suffered from depression and could not do anything for many years. I knew exactly what to do but could not put “pen to paper” and execute. Wish people took mental health more seriously and I don’t mean taking meds. Depression can reduce someone highly intelligent and functional down to absolutely nothing.
For people interested in explanations of depression that's more than "It's an imbalance in brain chemistry" I recommend looking at the work of Lisa Feldman-Barrett. She explains how brains work¹ in computational & evolutionary terms & it's a lot better than the typical reductionist explanations in terms of chemical imbalances.
I think they got us good with the imbalance of brain chemistry back in the 90s when Prozac was all the rage. Prozac was the Ozempic of the era with the financial incentives to make it so. The patents have subsequently expired so it isn't the cash cow it was. Odd how the science that went with it has now been discredited.
It's learned helplessness, is it not?
e.g. when whenever you move toward a progress route it morphs into something threatening or otherwise aversive. Probably gets implemented in software by the bad people.
True depression is fucking scary. Imagine having zero motivation to create or do anything. You experience no joy. You have no future. You are trapped in this hole.
The article title is "Depression Levels Are Associated with Reduced Capacity to Learn to Actively Avoid Aversive Events in Young Adults". Are we sure we want to turn that into "Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events"? I don't think there's good cause to go from correlation to this particular arrow of causation here. Reverse causation or a common third factor are also plausible.
I think this could be helpful in adding agency back onto victims sometimes. At least instead of actively avoiding the idea of suggesting they had any contribution to the outcome
Given my own experience with depression, it makes some amount of intuitive sense. For me at least, "sadness" is not wrong, but other than that it doesn't describe the experience very well at all.
When I'm really down, I can't bring myself to care about "aversive events". I might even welcome them a little bit, both because they fit my understanding better (everything is proceeding as it should be, this ant eating my flesh makes sense) and because it's an opportunity to feel something at least. For me anyway, depression is more about absence of affect than feeling "sad", and ironically it is maddening (and yet, in a sense I can't bring myself to care.)
Then again, my explanation suggests that depressed people ought to be better at avoiding harm through inaction, and I didn't see that in the abstract?
Another hypothesis is that you could stop at "Depression Reduces Capacity to Learn". It feels like all mental processing is muted, and especially any forms of change. I guess you could do a study where you have to learn to actively prevent an aversive event for someone else. But the 1st hypothesis may still apply: depressed people may still care less about harm to someone else (than if they were not depressed). But at least you could separate out whether it's only because depressed people don't care what happens to themselves.
I experience depression as an autonomous shutdown, under great mental weight.
The ability to make any mental and physical effort is greatly reduced to "depressed" levels.
It is the subconscious version of a situation where you need to climb out of a pit, but the walls are perfectly flat and oiled. Even though you need to get out of the pit, instead of scrambling, you just sit down.
The situation may not really be like that, but some deep cognitive machinery has concluded that it is.
It isn't anything like sadness. Although sadness could be part or proximate cause of a particular depressive episode, it is neither a necessary or sufficient condition.
--
I do believe depression has a real purpose. To turn off motivated but misdirected behavior, and force us to perform a reset of deeply held assumptions, expectations and motivations.
Pain effectively changes our expectations and behavior in the moment. Depression is like pain for complex situations. It forces major change, by disabling our current ineffective directives and giving us "time out" to slowly rewire. Until the subconscious believes we have found a new mental path, more aligned with reality, and lets motivation flow again.
But like battle surgery, it is a blunt instrument for doing something profound, and may inflict damage as well as repair it.
And when life circumstances don't let us take the pause and rest our brain is trying to enforce, it is a bit of living hell.
I agree, sadness is not how I would describe depression. It's more like... a deep sense of apathy, emptiness and hopelessness with no apparent cause or end in sight.
Of course that mental state would hinder learning, you're missing all the brain signals and reward feedback to care about anything.
I think everyone is wired a little differently. I agree that sadness isn’t the right word for it either, apathy and empathy and hopelessness are bang on. But for me, I guess I take refuge in learning. I find it hard to go and do anything physical or social, and the only outlet left is to learn obsessively cause otherwise I’ll lose my mind. Maybe trying to stockpile knowledge for the day when the hopelessness goes away and it’ll end up being useful?
> I find it hard to go and do anything physical or social, and the only outlet left is to learn obsessively cause otherwise I’ll lose my mind.
That's depression's "twin" sister (with a different personality) anxiety taking command of your behaviour. It's well-established now that obsessive-compulsive and avoidance behaviours are linked to anxiety. Both depression and anxiety feed each other.
After a few months feeling well, I'm experiencing depression again and your description is very fitting.
The authors take a leap in assuming there's a difficulty with overriding a response. But in my and others' experience from group therapy, I can confidently say it's more like either apathy or being numbed out, to the point of either not noticing or caring that the aversive sound is happening.
This is how SSRI has felt for me also, incidentally: an even deeper apathy, setting in from lack of any emotion at all.
[dead]
I agree. It's not sadness, it's something gnawing your teeth in silence a.k.a. madness.
Well said and thank you for sharing
This is exactly what you'd expect if the hypothesis that depression is an evolved adaptation for surviving no-win scenarios that can only be waited out holds.
In a scenario where a disaster has negatively affected the primary productivity of the local food web (e.g. volcano, forest fire, bolide, plague or tsunami), the groups of social species that exist in an environment are likely to engage in internal strife until the food web productivity the group subsists on has returned to normality. Phenotypes which reduce activity across the board without making any changes to their distribution of activities, just hoping for things to get better on their own, are likely the phenotypes that are most successful at surviving to reproduce within conditions of intragroup strife when these infrequent disasters occur.
If this line of reasoning bears out to correctly describe the actual selection pressures that have led to the genes for depression evolving, it follows that what we call major depressive disorder is in fact the genome seeing and carrying out false positives for needing the famine-survival strategy.
.
Incidentally, I first came across the theory I'm repeating here on Steven Byrne's neuroscience blog, if you want an avenue for finding sources.
I do like evolutionary explanations for a lot of human behavior, but this one feels a little too pat to me.
Patience, "biding our time", "hunkering down", etc. are actual emotional states we can experience and recognize, and depression doesn't feel even remotely like for most people as far as I'm aware.
Also, this explanation would only really work if the entire group entered a dormant depressed state together. Otherwise, the non-depressed ones would capitalize the tribe's resource and everyone would still end up screwed. But depression doesn't seem to have that sort contagious social component. On the contrary, when someone is depressed, the immediate response by people around them is generally try to "cheer them up" or encourage them to exit that depressed state. And while the depressed person is likely conveying a whole lot of negative sentiment, most aren't actively attempting to get the people around them to be depressed too. That's the last thing most depressed people want.
> I do like evolutionary explanations for a lot of human behavior, but this one feels a little too pat to me.
I agree.
> Patience, "biding our time", "hunkering down", etc. are actual emotional states we can experience and recognize, and depression doesn't feel even remotely like for most people as far as I'm aware.
But I don't think that's a valid counterargument. Depression doesn't need to feel like that or be motivated by that in order to be selected for. As long as it has the same effect as someone actively choosing to reduce consumption, the argument works. (Again, I'm still skeptical of the argument.)
> Also, this explanation would only really work if the entire group entered a dormant depressed state together.
That's valid, though to salvage the argument, you could say it applies to situations where active behavior turns out to be maladaptive. Perhaps fleeing the volcano causes you to inhale more gases and definitely die/fail to reproduce, whereas moping in place gives you a chance to luck out and be in the right place at the right times and thereby survive. That's a stretch, but the other examples are better: maybe the active people compete and kill each other off. Or the active people catch the plague while trying to help out.
Actively avoiding harm might even be the better approach 99% of the time, and yet the 1% where inaction is better means that the trait can survive. Say everyone has an innate x% chance of being active. Event 1: 60% of active people survive, 40% of inactive do. Repeat several times. Event N: the soldiers find and kill 100% of active people and 75% of inactive. The survivors will not have x=100.
Related example: dinosaurs and small mammals. Big things did really well until they didn't.
> On the contrary, when someone is depressed, the immediate response by people around them is generally try to "cheer them up" or encourage them to exit that depressed state.
True, but that is when times are generally good. I doubt people would be "cheer up" in an actual disaster situation.
From what i understand depressed people generally do well in disaster situations because they can still focus on critical tasks without getting overwhelmed by all the other bad stuff going on that isn't an immediate problem. (Possibly that's just a popular conception from movies. No idea if its true)
It is from the movies. Depressed people in disaster situations dont act and frustrated their close ones by being additional burden. Disaster does not cure depression, the issue is still there, just with worst consequences.
> On the contrary, when someone is depressed, the immediate response by people around them is generally try to "cheer them up" or encourage them to exit that depressed state.
An explanation for that behavior is that this kind of reaction serves as protection against the contagion. It doesn’t help the depressed but the environment around them, to not join in and feel the feelings of despair and hopelessness.
According to some theories, depression means other feelings like anger and anxiety are being suppressed - resulting in transference and counter-transference.
There is nothing about evolutionary theory that posits that all current biological structures/functions must have a evolutionary purpose.
Only the system as a whole must carry superior fitness, not each of its individual components. Given a sufficiently complex system, its rather expected that there will be negative, or even outright destructive functions that arise. You can certainly try to find a positive reason for why cancer, disease, death during conception, etc exist, but there is a much simpler explanation.
Depression in this view, isn't something outright that was adaptively constructed, but merely a side effect of how the mind works.
My understanding of the "modern" point of view is that selection acting at the level of the gene (not the organism or group) is sufficient as a theory. The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype go into this stuff in a lot of detail.
Totally agree with your first sentence though. And even if there is a plausible adaptive function it may have only been adaptive in the past, or might be a side effect of some other adaptive function (see sickle cell anemia), or a host of other possibilities.
Why not the group?
Have a read about kin selection, for instance. There are lots of facts about e.g social insects (like the male/female/sterile ratio iirc) that were thought to only be explainable by group selection, but later were found to work out purely from considerations of gene selection. I'm just a layperson though, would highly recommend Dawkins writing on this stuff. It's much less polemic than his writing on religion, if that puts you off at all.
I think the basic criticism of group selection is that at an individual level it can be beneficial to go against the group's goal, and you need to explain why that doesn't happen (even very small advantages are rapidly boosted by selection). This is one of the great puzzles of selection - how does cooperation evolve from selfish interests? The theory of group selection just asserts that it does, which is not very satisfactory.
There's behaviour at an individual/group level that is only explained by selection at a lower level. Consider the placenta releasing allocrine hormones during pregnancy while the mother's body increases insulin levels, or consider male lions killing off the cubs of defeated males.
Group selection only works under some rare situations. Groups should rapidly build and disintegrate to make group selection work.
I've often wondered if depression is exactly that, a system level optimization. Sometimes depression just happens, but sometimes it is triggered by low social status, realizing you've hurt someone in an unjustified or accidental way, having other mental illness, being seriously injured, or some other way that threatens the fitness of the overall group. Depression might be a (albeit flawed) system level way of reducing the amount of physical and social resources those people consume so that the non-depressed strata of society can better take them.
Note: this is a speculation, not assertions of fact
I think its just a natural consequence of our mind working on a positive-negative reward system, which I think its critical to any intelligence. Being manically positive is just as detrimental as being chronically depressed.
Its entirely normal to be negative, or to ignore stimuli, or decide not to do things. In some situations, say if you were trapped in a cage your whole life, you'd agree it'd be entirely normal to be depressed. It would make no sense to waste energy running around hitting iron bars that won't break.
In this sense, depression is somewhat of a social construct. We determine someone is depressed because we believe their reaction to the environment to not be normal.
You’re proposing group selection, which always never happens.
Evolution functions not at the level of groups, or even individuals, but genes inside of individuals.
Most of the time thinking of it as group selection at the genetic level (=individuals) does work, fortunately.
It makes technical sense that if one individual helped for example to make the rest of the colony propgate 3x faster, it would be a collective reproductive advantage
I believe it would also apply similarly under kin selection.
Such phenotypes would fail to reproduce, leading to the genes for those phenotypes dying out.
If the genotype is mostly 'expressed' as depression in certain scenarios that allow your kin to reproduce better at the expense of you reproducing worse, that's not necessarily true.
Imagine for a moment, a version of depression that appears after someone gets their reproductive member cut off (perhaps encounter an angry lion?), but they are still around to compete for food with the extended family's children.
The rule of thumb is if something has a cost and persists over time it must have some benefit even if we don’t understand what that is. Otherwise, creatures not paying the cost will outcompete over time.
Or it’s caused by the same thing as something that does have a benefit.
Context: I dabbled in evolutionary biology at the university level, not enough for even a minor in the subject.
My understanding is the existence of selection does not necessarily mean every trait that exists right now has an evolutionary benefit. It is more coarse grained that anything that doesn’t prevent you from breeding is acceptable. Depressed people are not made infertile by their depression, so there will be a subset of depressed people (assuming depression even has a hereditary component). This doesn’t mean the trait of depression has an advantage in order to exist, it just isn’t so much of a disadvantage that it doesn’t exist.
> the hypothesis that depression is an evolved adaptation for surviving no-win scenarios that can only be waited out holds
I remember from my days studying to be an actuary that the population that can best estimate mortality odds from the gut are actually the depressed. (Most of us tend to be way too optimistic about common risks and pessimistic about uncommon ones.)
This was also used to explain mammalian postpartum depression, when the mother has to make a wretching call as to whether to keep the offspring given its health, her health and the environmental context.
This fits exactly with how depression feels to me, and appears to manifest itself in me behavior-wise, according to my partner. Def going to give this some thought. Thanks!
Elsewhere in the thread, people disagree. +1 to the reasons I suspect that what we call "depression" is actually several different things.
I can imagine a great many things we collapse to one term because of similarities are in fact distinct, from myriad causes. Cancer is an example. The common cold is diagnosed based on symptoms, but is a reaction to any of several kinds of virus. Hell, a crab or a tree is not one class of things, but many that converged on common solutions.
There’s an ADHD specialist, a neurologist, who wrote a book called “ADHD Does Not Exist”. His core argument is that ADHD is not a single disorder but a collection of symptoms that cluster together from many different underlying causes. https://isbn.nu/9780062266743
"Depression stops ant whorls" is my favorite quick and snappy summary.
depression, like alcoholism, is a crutch and a symptom of a deeper issue, not an independent behaviour in a vacuum.
My personal experience is that the cost of enduring a negative stimulus is not simply a function of the magnitude of the negative stimulus, but rather the magnitude of the negative stimulus in relation to the magnitude of all other concurrent negative stimuli. This study controls the environment so that a single negative stimulus is isolated and additional external negative stimuli are minimized, but it cannot control for the fact that a depressed person also endures a constant barrage of negative stimuli which are generated internally (hopelessness, exhaustion, fear, self-doubt, etc). The magnitude of these internally generated negative stimuli is likely much larger than that of the aversive external stimulus used in this study, so it seems reasonable that the marginal relief obtained by avoiding the external stimulus may be perceived as relatively negligible, or at least diminished to the point that the cost of avoiding is greater than the cost of enduring.
"These findings suggest that in young adults, depressive symptoms are associated with difficulty in overriding prepotent responses to actively avoid aversive outcomes in the absence of reward."
My word... Could they have phrased that any less clearly?
As I understand it: the more depressive symptoms the subjects showed, the less likely they were to actively avoid bad outcomes (unless there was some other associated reward).
Yep, a sentence only someone on tenure-track could love.
ChatGPT, asked to translate to a high schooler: "Basically, this study found that young people with depression sometimes struggle to break automatic habits, especially when they’re trying to avoid something bad and there isn’t a prize or reward for doing it."
When asked to provide real life examples from the paper conclusion:
Workplace Example
Scenario: An employee has a colleague who tends to send aggressive emails if they don’t receive updates on time.
Healthy Active Avoidance: The employee learns, “If I send a quick status update every morning, I avoid the stress of hostile emails.” They adopt this as a habit.
Depressive Active Avoidance Deficit: A person with depressive symptoms may take longer to make this connection or fail to act even after realizing it. They know sending updates might help, but initiating the behavior feels too effortful or pointless. As a result, they keep receiving stressful emails, reinforcing the feeling of helplessness.
> ChatGPT, asked to translate to a high schooler: "Basically, this study found that young people with depression sometimes struggle to break automatic habits, especially when they’re trying to avoid something bad and there isn’t a prize or reward for doing it."
The translation is just as much of a word salad as the original, just with simpler vocabulary. Worse, it mangles the key point.
Prepotent responses aren't "automatic habits," but overriding responses (e.g. pain) [1]. The "sometimes" qualifier is unsubstantiated when describing "association". And the struggle isn't amplified ("especially") when avoiding something bad absent reward, the first part of the sentence is conditional upon the absence of a reward. (It's nonsense to say pool drownings are especially common in pools.)
[1] https://dictionary.apa.org/prepotent-response
wow, you managed to make it more convoluted than the original.
> you managed to make it more convoluted than the original
Not relevant. I'm not trying to break down the original text, that was done adequately by the top comment. I'm showing why the LLM summary is nonsense.
> sometimes struggle to break automatic habits
The article claimed it is a failure to learn whereas the phrasing from ChatGPT results in a much wider implication. Failure in a struggle to do something could imply a moral failure. If that's the message people get from this research, then there's a real risk it could worsen depression.
Please don't post ChatGPT slop without then going through it with a fine-toothed comb, and checking whether it's correct. (It almost never is, but the criticism can be interesting… in discussion about ChatGPT. Otherwise, it's a derail.)
Your summary claims more than the original you quoted, no?
Example:
Case 1: Subject tries piano sight-reading exercises, if they get less than 80% accuracy a loud annoying horn will blare. Then subject goes again and try to improve the score.
Care 2. Subject tries piano sight-reading exercises, and if they get less than 80% accuracy they get notified that they didn't succeed at the test. Then they go again and try to improve their score.
The article strongly implies depression will make improvement more difficult in case 1 by the amount found in the study. But it doesn't necessarily imply that (or anything strongly) for case 2.
Your summary strongly implies that depression impedes progress in both cases at the same rate as the outcome of the study.
I'm not a domain expert but I'm going to guess "having bad outcomes" is as poor a paraphrase of "overriding prepotent responses" here as "having functions" would be to characterize functional programming languages.
I don't really know what the original is claiming, thanks to how it was written. I only offered a guess at what the authors were saying.
So, you're saying that the study was narrower in scope and that the results are only applicable to specific bad/negative outcomes?
I suffered from depression and could not do anything for many years. I knew exactly what to do but could not put “pen to paper” and execute. Wish people took mental health more seriously and I don’t mean taking meds. Depression can reduce someone highly intelligent and functional down to absolutely nothing.
Was wondering... what eventually got you out of it?
This is fascinating, but for some reason I don't care enough to read it all. So I just save it to a pdf file for later maybe!
For people interested in explanations of depression that's more than "It's an imbalance in brain chemistry" I recommend looking at the work of Lisa Feldman-Barrett. She explains how brains work¹ in computational & evolutionary terms & it's a lot better than the typical reductionist explanations in terms of chemical imbalances.
¹https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KliAI9umFyY
I think they got us good with the imbalance of brain chemistry back in the 90s when Prozac was all the rage. Prozac was the Ozempic of the era with the financial incentives to make it so. The patents have subsequently expired so it isn't the cash cow it was. Odd how the science that went with it has now been discredited.
It's learned helplessness, is it not? e.g. when whenever you move toward a progress route it morphs into something threatening or otherwise aversive. Probably gets implemented in software by the bad people.
True depression is fucking scary. Imagine having zero motivation to create or do anything. You experience no joy. You have no future. You are trapped in this hole.
Hence (for example) the doom scrolling wheel keeps spinning.
The article title is "Depression Levels Are Associated with Reduced Capacity to Learn to Actively Avoid Aversive Events in Young Adults". Are we sure we want to turn that into "Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events"? I don't think there's good cause to go from correlation to this particular arrow of causation here. Reverse causation or a common third factor are also plausible.
I think this could be helpful in adding agency back onto victims sometimes. At least instead of actively avoiding the idea of suggesting they had any contribution to the outcome
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