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.
Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events
31–40 of 67 posts
Re: Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events
#32"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 r…
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."
> 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.
Re: Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events
#33I 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.
Re: Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events
#34My 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 contro…
[deleted]
Re: Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events
#35Given 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…
I agree. It's not sadness, it's something gnawing your teeth in silence a.k.a. madness.
Re: Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events
#36Given 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…
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.
Re: Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events
#37Given 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…
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.
After a few months feeling well, I'm experiencing depression again and your description is very fitting.
Re: Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fo…
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 ada…
Why not the group?
Re: Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events
#39Given 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…
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.
Re: Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
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