oh agreed - I very much support what my psych professor once said, which is that mental illness is a misnomer and the set of conditions represented by “mental illness” would more accurately be called “physical illness with psychological symptoms.” but, if I’m reading the article in question correctly, the psychologist in question’s theory refers specifically to mild, non-clinical depression, or depressive symptoms that don’t reach “diagnosable” levels. I don’t think he’s saying “let’s cure depression by telling people to have more accurate goals”; he’s saying that certain depressive symptoms (the article doesn’t specify which) might be your brain’s way of telling you you’re currently on a wrong path (the very short article doesn’t really talk about priorities or worldview so much as unreachable goals). The preliminary study they’ve used to start testing out their (admittedly wholly unproven) theory found: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.
Their conclusion was that those who experienced mild depressive symptoms could, indeed, disengage more easily from unreachable goals. That supports Dr Nesse’s hypothesis. But the new study also found a remarkable corollary: those women who could disengage from the unattainable proved less likely to suffer more serious depression in the long run.Mild depressive symptoms can therefore be seen as a natural part of dealing with failure in young adulthood. They set in when a goal is identified as unreachable and lead to a decline in motivation. In this period of low motivation, energy is saved and new goals can be found. If this mechanism does not function properly, though, severe depression can be the consequence.
This would seem to indicate the researchers are well aware that severe depression is absolutely not simply a question of correct goal-setting; rather they suspect that it (sometimes) is the result when your brain’s mechanism for nudging you in the right directions is no longer working as it ought. I think the analogy with pain is helpful; it is normal and extremely beneficial for your hand to feel pain if you set it on a hot stove, because it is your body’s way of saying “hey, don’t do that!” However, if you wake up every morning in severe pain with no external cause, your body’s pain mechanism is not functioning correctly and you have an illness.
And there is a range of depression - some people have severe clinical depression no matter their external circumstances because it’s just the way their brain chemistry is set up; others may find that some things exacerbate their own depressive tendencies more than others. For me personally, my experiences with depression have all been brought on by external circumstances which often have been reminiscent of the type of unreachable goals mentioned in the article, but because of my particular brain chemistry what some people with different brain chemistry might have experienced as a mild (i.e. non-clinical) depressive state instead turned into a clinical depression; I would never assume that my own experiences with depression are like anyone else’s, or that because I happen to have depression triggered generally by external circumstances, that is true of every single depressed person ever.
