The idea that depression is useful isn’t new, but this Sunday’s Times Magazine advances a fascinating and controversial hypothesis: that it might actually help us analyze our lives.
Jonah Lehrer‘s thoughtful piece notes that depression has long been linked to creativity. He mentions that one survey found 80% of students at the Iowa Writers Workshop exhibited some type of depression (I do have to wonder whether the survey took place during an Iowa winter). But the throes of depression haven’t been known for improving critical thinking skills — until recently. Specifically, studies have found that depressed people show increased activity in a brain area called the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), which is also associated with “intense focus.” Psychiatrist Andy Thomson and psychologist Paul Andrews believe the VLPFC’s involvement may point to a link between rumination — a key part of depressive thinking in which sufferers revisit painful thoughts over and over — and actually arriving at solutions to life’s problems. Lehrer writes that increased VLPFC activity leads to “an extremely analytical style of thinking” in which people “tend to think in a more deliberate fashion, breaking down their complex problems into their simpler parts.” He continues,
Andrews and Thomson see depression as a way of bolstering our feeble analytical skills, making it easier to pay continuous attention to a difficult dilemma. The downcast mood and activation of the VLPFC are part of a “coordinated system” that, Andrews and Thomson say, exists “for the specific purpose of effectively analyzing the complex life problem that triggered the depression.” If depression didn’t exist – if we didn’t react to stress and trauma with endless ruminations – then we would be less likely to solve our predicaments. Wisdom isn’t cheap, and we pay for it with pain.
The idea has many detractors — Peter Kramer, author of Listening to Prozac, argues that Andrews and Thomson really only consider people whose depression is a response to a specific life event, and not those who suffer from “chronic depression and the sort of self-hating, paralyzing, hopeless, circular rumination it inspires.” And Andrews and Thomson themselves admit that “sometimes the symptoms can spiral out of control” — depression may help some people solve problems, but it paralyzes others, making them incapable of doing anything at all. As anyone who’s struggled with depression in a variety of situations knows, sometimes the bad feelings may be trying to tell you something concrete about your life, and sometimes they’re just not.