WARNING THIS POST MAY BE TRIGGERING TO PEOPLE WITH DEPRESSION AND RELATED CONDITIONS
Is depression actually good for us?
Or at least--is it supposed to be good for us?
This post excerpts an article which suggests that depression may be "a kind of intense, isolated problem-solving introspection that...resolves complex troubles."
According to this theory, the depressive person loses interest in life because their body is shutting everything down and re-routing energy to the neurons of the frontal cortex. This is "to help people analyze their problems without getting distracted."
Proof of this, according to the authors, comes from "Several studies" which "have found that expressive writing promotes quicker resolution of depression, and [researchers] suggest that this is because depressed people gain insight into their problems."
So, have we got this? Problem-solving, insight, bye-bye depression.
Let me just say right now, because I have depression and I know I have some regular readers with depression, that I think this is bullshit. Or at least, it makes one very important bullshit assumption.
Allow me to demonstrate.
So, there's this friend of mine. The friend of mine has a mother. Ten years ago, the mother got a job with the county as, I think, a social worker.
Along about the time this woman drove her third battered infant to the hospital, she became so severely depressed that she had to go on disability. It has taken her the better part of a decade to even start putting her life back together.
And this is the problem with the assessment of depression as some kind of X-Treme Problem Solving. Or at least, it's the problem with assuming that the X-Treme Problem Solving just needs pen and paper to do its magic:
How do you solve the problem of battered infants?
That's right. You can't.
You can't stop assholes from beating up their babies and breaking their tiny bones. You're helpless to do anything except drive the poor little things in their full-body hard casts to their follow-up appointments.
Nor can you figure out why assholes do this. Explanations totally break down. God? Karma? Free will? Fuck it, all of it. You're thrown back on the grim facts of psychopathy, sociopathy, legacies of abuse. In short, you're thrown back on total absurdism, which, although true, is not a solution. Or a resolution. Or a catharsis. Or a way forward. Or anything.
So: SOME PROBLEMS CAN'T RESOLVE. By their nature, they can. not. resolve.
This is not just a question of external evil. A lot of inner lives are marked by impossible questions too. Why do some parents not love their children? Why do some parents love their children deeply, yet not give them what they need? Why do appearances sometimes lie and sometimes tell the truth? Why do eyes sometimes say different things from words? What does it mean when both messages contradict each other, and yet both are true?
What if the unconscious part of my brain starts shutting me down to figure all this shit out when I'm ten, before I can even cognitively grasp what I'm working on? How do I live with trying to solve things I can't even understand and define? How do I live with knowing that my reality is warping conceptually but not being able to understand what I know?
If depression therefore is an effort at last-ditch problem solving, and I'm not at all sure it is, but going with that model (there are, after all, always environmental actors--"all symptoms are overdetermined," as M. Scott Peck put it)....IF therefore we are using the "problem-solving" model, we need to remember that not all problems have a solution. Not all problems even make sense.
And what happens then?
Sadly, the world is not exactly littered with people who spontaneously abandon the bed of their despair. "Yeah, I spent three years of my life in a dark room obsessing over the question of why my mother loved me and yet failed to protect me, but you know, I finally hit the wall. I can't resolve it in this lifetime, so I'm going to check out the sale of Jimmy Choos at DSW instead."
Sometimes this does happen, and mazeltov to those folks. But not very often.
The overtaxed brain, faced with a brick wall, does not usually proceed to abandon the problem and restore power to the fuzzy-slippers-and-cute-little-bunnies part of itself. No...it paints its face and goes full Sergeant Barnes on itself. It set out to take that hill, dammit, and it is GOING TO DO IT. Absurdism may be a brick wall, but walls, in the end, are just things, like bones, and assholes. And selves. Right? Yeah.
So what happens then?
Well, then, the exhausted brain starts coming up with those solutions it demanded of itself.
Like death. Its own.
Sinking into the velvety blackness, after all, makes a lot of sense when you're fully confronted with the fact of a cold, random, utterly absurd, Heath-Ledger's-Joker universe. Think about it. By this time, you're really tired, you've forgotten how you used to feel when you saw a rainbow (if you ever knew--some people's depression hits in childhood), you've utterly failed to resolve The Problem because by definition it is not resolvable, so there is a core flaw, a fundamental fail, either in you or in the world or both, and it would be ever so nice to leave this fucked-up party.
By this time, you are well and truly fucked. You've lost all perspective, you've sustained physical changes in your brain which trap you in this maze, you've probably lost years of your life, and you're either pissed or completely resigned.
At this point, being encouraged to write things down will not help.
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So it is possible that the "adaptation" explanation is at least partially true...but it's not relevant, or, as the Buddha put it, "it does not further."
Also, there's the question of why, if depression is primarily a situational adaptation, it's heritable. (Some of us are more determined problem-solvers than others??)
And the question of why, if it's something with the potential to help us, everyone who experiences it is so signally ungrateful for the privilege.
And the question of why some people, even now, seem so determined to deny that the brain can become ill. Like any other part of the body.
