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Category: Depression
Why Depression Is A Perfectly Normal Response To Complex Problems
Rather than being an abnormal condition, aspects of depression are actually highly adaptive.
Rather than being an abnormal condition, aspects of depression are actually highly adaptive.
Depression can be a perfectly normal reaction to facing a complex problem.
Rather than being an abnormal condition, aspects of depression are actually highly adaptive.
Being depressed involves devoting time and energy to thinking about the problem, trying to understand its causes and generating possible solutions.
Dr Paul Andrews, an expert on depression, says:
“Depression has long been seen as nothing but a problem.
We are asking whether it may actually be a natural adaptation that the brain uses to tackle certain problems.
We are seeing more evidence that depression can be a necessary and beneficial adaptation to dealing with major, complex issues that defy easy understanding.”
Psychologists label the state of focusing on problems to the exclusion of all else ‘rumination’.
Marriage breakups, chronic illnesses and other difficulties can lead to highly ruminative states.
Depressed people lose their interest in anything apart from their problems.
This can lead to the classic signs of depression, including disrupted sleeping, eating and cutting oneself off from social interaction.
To explore this problem-solving reaction to life’s difficulties, researchers have developed a way of measuring analytical rumination.
After giving the test to 579 people, they found it was related to depression.
Thinking of depression as a natural response to a difficult situation could be beneficial, said Dr Skye Barbic, the study’s first author:
“Instead of discussing the disease as a ‘bad thing’, clinicians may be able to help patients have insight about the potential adaptive purposes of their thinking and how this may be used as a strength to move forward in their lives.”
Dr Zachary Durisko, study co-author, said:
“When working with many people who experience chronic health conditions, depression is often the limiting factor to recovery and goal attainment.
The test can potentially quickly tell us when people are struggling to identify their problems, trying to set goals, or trying to move forward in their lives.
We hypothesize that very different levels of support and care are required throughout these different stages of thinking.”
The study was published in the journal PLoS ONE (Barbic et al., 2014).
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The Ways Depression Changes People’s Personality
Study tests if depression changes people’s personality.
Study tests if depression changes people’s personality.
People who are depressed become more neurotic, more dependent on others and more thoughtful in the short-term.
After recovering from depression, though, people’s personality returns almost completely to its pre-depression state.
Depression does not change people’s personality in the long-term, the study found.
Indeed, people’s personality may become slightly more healthy after recovering from an episode of depression.
However, depression does affect people’s personality somewhat while they are experiencing an episode.
There was some evidence, though, that people lose some of their social confidence after an episode of depression.
It may also be that multiple, severe bouts of depression can have a long-lasting effect on personality.
The conclusions come from thousands of people, some with and some without depression, who were followed across six years.
The study’s authors explain the results:
“None of the scales for which negative change would be
predicted by the scar hypothesis (increased neuroticism, emotional reliance, and lack of social self-confidence; decreased ascendance/dominance, sociability, and extroversion) showed such change.In general, scores on these scales remained stable from time 1 to time 2; if they changed at all, they changed numerically in the direction of healthier scores at time 2.”
No mental scars
The results showed no evidence of the so-called ‘scar hypothesis’.
The authors explain that…
“…the “scar” or “complication” model, suggesting that the depressive episode is the cause of lasting change in personality.”
Instead, the study supports the idea that certain personality types are vulnerable to depression.
Negative emotionality is the strongest risk factor for depression among personality traits, research finds.
Negative emotionality is essentially being highly neurotic and involves finding it hard to deal with stress and experiencing a lot of negative emotions and mood swings.
People who are neurotic are more likely to experience negative emotions like fear, jealousy, guilt, worry and envy.
The study was published in The American Journal of Psychiatry (Shea et al., 1996).
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