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If you haven’t read about them, you might find evolutionary approaches to depression interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_approaches_to_depr
by dazhengca 4y ago
If you haven’t read about them, you might find evolutionary approaches to depression interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_approaches_to_depression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_approaches_to_dep...
For me personally, these models offer much more explanatory power. We don’t have to always view depression as a mental illness.
- Sakos 4y agoExplanatory power is good if you're trying to understand where depression comes from. It's not helpful as a guide for clinical treatment of a person suffering depression right now.
- boffinAudio 4y agoIt also doesn't help sell high-profit pills to a gullible public desperate for anything that will make life seem better than it really is ..
- tgv 4y ago> Some psychiatrists raise the concern that evolutionary psychologists seek to explain hidden adaptive advantages without engaging the rigorous empirical testing required to back up such claims. That's putting it very mildly. Not that it's impossible that depression is an evolutionary trait, but that whole page is a bunch of highly contradicting, unprovable "this is deep" philosophy. It isn't even clear how to diagnose depression, what the underlying causes are, and if people were depressed 50,000 years ago. They all assume there has to be some benefit. There isn't a theory that argues it's just a negative effect of some other beneficial development. They don't even tell how developing depression could possibly positively affect procreation.