whoa, so according to this dude, I actually have a totally legitimate basis for talking about how the best thing I have ever done for my own mental health is stop giving a shit about classes/achievement/etc, and how the less I care, the better I feel. I sort of suspected I was maybe just being lazy or something, but I like this guy’s explanation way better.CLINICAL depression is a serious ailment, but almost everyone gets mildly depressed from time to time. Randolph Nesse, a psychologist and researcher in evolutionary medicine at the University of Michigan, likens the relationship between mild and clinical depression to the one between normal and chronic pain. He sees both pain and low mood as warning mechanisms and thinks that, just as understanding chronic pain means first understanding normal pain, so understanding clinical depression means understanding mild depression.
Dr Nesse’s hypothesis is that, as pain stops you doing damaging physical things, so low mood stops you doing damaging mental ones—in particular, pursuing unreachable goals. Pursuing such goals is a waste of energy and resources. Therefore, he argues, there is likely to be an evolved mechanism that identifies certain goals as unattainable and inhibits their pursuit—and he believes that low mood is at least part of that mechanism…
This makes a lot of sense to me: the most depressed I ever got was in college when I was pursuing social connections to an extent that wasn’t manageable or realistic for me. Years later, when I gave myself permission to stop caring about having more than just a couple close friends (and of course my extended acquaintance-sphere on the Internet), I got a lot better.
Spending as much time alone as I do seems strange to most people, but it’s what I need.
This makes me very uneasy. It seems to buy into the myth that depression is “all in the mind” (which it is, if by “mind” you mean “brain chemistry” - oh but then let’s not talk about all the physical symptoms like headaches, back pain, incessant muscle aches, etc…) and that you can think yourself out of it or get over it by having a better outlook or different priorities. Shifting your priorities to be more in line w/ your worldview is not a bad thing. But it’s not going to cure depression, because, see, as we’ve been fighting for so long to get people to understand, depression is an ILLNESS. And just as asthma, diabetes, arthritis, and a million other things are chronic illnesses which require treatment - and different treatments work for different peopel - so is depression.
