This is an interesting read on a similar take on major depression,
https://grasshoppermouse.github.io/2018/12/16/seven-reasons-...
Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study
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Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study
#32Couldn't a person have a biological makeup that predisposes them to experience greater or lesser adversity? If mental disorders are adaptive responses, that doesn't seem to rule out that some people may be more prone to interpreting situations as adversarial.
Yes of course one could have more or less of a response. Situations and circumstamces (we’re talking about entire lives worth of experiences) vary so much though that it would be impossible for an outsider to state you are weaker based on the limited knowledge you can have about another person.
Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study
#33I'm most surprised to learn that this _isn't_ the current prevailing view in the medical profession. I am not a doctor, but it's always seemed more natural to me to view depression and anxiety as adaptive behaviours - albeit perhaps ones that can end up being triggered too far. I read an article once (wish I could find it) that one advantage of mild depression was as sort a "call for help and support" from other embe…
Because this actually IS the prevailing view, but it is not really actionable. What is the alternative to drugs? A real advantage of depression is you won't challenge authority so you'll be more likely to appease the Alpha members of the group. So what? How would this help a doctor treat a mental health patient?
A combination of targeted therapy and short courses of drugs designed to ease the therapy process and control symptoms in the short term?
Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study
#34I'm most surprised to learn that this _isn't_ the current prevailing view in the medical profession. I am not a doctor, but it's always seemed more natural to me to view depression and anxiety as adaptive behaviours - albeit perhaps ones that can end up being triggered too far. I read an article once (wish I could find it) that one advantage of mild depression was as sort a "call for help and support" from other embe…
I've read a similar article although with a different angle, stating that the advantage of depression is that members of a tribe which are a burden to the rest will eventually withdraw completely and/or kill themselves and therefore cease being a burden to the tribe. That said, I don't know how well-founded the claim was either.
Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study
#35PTSD is quite obviously a response to adversity, that is already implied by the name! What am I missing here? Why is this news?
The point is whether it's adaptive , i.e. whether it has evolved because it is beneficial (such as our pain aversion), rather than arising as an unfortunate bug in the system (such as cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder which seems pretty clearly not to be adaptive).
Of course PTSD is beneficial: it gets you discharged from military, for example, so the chances of you being in the situation where someone is shooting bazooka at you drop to zero.
In general PTSD helps you avoid traumatic experience in future.
Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study
#36I'm most surprised to learn that this _isn't_ the current prevailing view in the medical profession. I am not a doctor, but it's always seemed more natural to me to view depression and anxiety as adaptive behaviours - albeit perhaps ones that can end up being triggered too far. I read an article once (wish I could find it) that one advantage of mild depression was as sort a "call for help and support" from other embe…
But this doesn't make economic sense. Billions could be lost from prescription revenues worldwide if this became the prevailing view. Hence, we will all continue to be "sick" and treatable with medication, rather than adaptively responding to adversity.
Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study
#37I'm most surprised to learn that this _isn't_ the current prevailing view in the medical profession. I am not a doctor, but it's always seemed more natural to me to view depression and anxiety as adaptive behaviours - albeit perhaps ones that can end up being triggered too far. I read an article once (wish I could find it) that one advantage of mild depression was as sort a "call for help and support" from other embe…
There's a general bucketing in the modern world of all unhappiness being depression that should be treated, which I don't think really fits what's going on. There are absolutely cases where anxiety and depression are a medical issue which warrant treatment with medication, but there are also completely legitimate reasons for those conditions. If your lifestyle is one of never leaving the house, zero social contact, w…
Seems like depression is like tissue regeneration. It tries to fix things then it bails out. Depression is often called a pit, when you're in it, you haven't the slightest idea nor capability to do whatever. The only evolutionnary value I see in this is making you so sluggish you'll be left out by whoever or whatever is harming you because time goes on and they'll move.
Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study
#38We could rationalize an opposite hypothesis as well, perhaps they are adaptive responses to lack of adversity. It would be interesting if a good experiment can be formulated to figure it out.
One rationale is that life for billions of years and humans for millions have faced harsh conditions never letting us rest and relax for long.
So if we are sitting still, relaxing, often it meant something must be wrong(physically or mentally) and in less sympathetic times mental illness would encourage culling, either by the tribe or yourself to ensure the limited resources were spent on people who are contributing more physical action.
Roles that didn't have to deal with as much adversity obviously formed eventually, but they took a long time to stabilize, likely being poorly tolerated in most ages, and if the hypothesis was true, were plagued more with the OP's issues.
Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study
#39I'm most surprised to learn that this _isn't_ the current prevailing view in the medical profession. I am not a doctor, but it's always seemed more natural to me to view depression and anxiety as adaptive behaviours - albeit perhaps ones that can end up being triggered too far. I read an article once (wish I could find it) that one advantage of mild depression was as sort a "call for help and support" from other embe…
I've read a similar article although with a different angle, stating that the advantage of depression is that members of a tribe which are a burden to the rest will eventually withdraw completely and/or kill themselves and therefore cease being a burden to the tribe. That said, I don't know how well-founded the claim was either.
It's hard to determine what our ancestors actually did. I'm sure you could argue any number of solutions they might have used. I'm wondering though what the prevalence is of these afflictions were back then or now in modern hunter-gatherer societies. The latter is not proof of anything, but it would be an indication of what a possibility might be like.
Re: Anxiety, depression, and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity: study
#40This feels so obvious. 30 years from now, we might very well look back at these labels we applied to people, implying something is wrong with them for responding to their negative circumstances, and feel like we were living in the dark ages. When we see historic rises in mental disorders following an external event like the coronavirus pandemic, is it not something we should reasonably expect? I can accept that some…
I hope so, and that what we now call depression will be considered as silly a moniker as hysteria or "troubled humours" back when.