Cole:

How does your body feel when you are at peace with the unpredictability and unknowability of life? Try to evoke body sensations for this idea. It’s a lot harder, and the sensations are fleeting. These are the sensations of homeostasis, of wellness, of – from the body’s perspective – finding home.

Check out my guest post and the great comments!

If you can relate, then you should download Furies!

From the book:

First thing this morning, computer disaster! I blew my iTunes library all to hell when I reformatted the wrong hard drive. The last seven hours were a computer nightmare, without food, without a bathroom break, and finally with a migraine headache. I needed to eat. I walked into the kitchen, ready to break something.

I watched my son struggle with the peanut butter jar and wondered if he felt like I did - frustrated beyond any justifiable reason.

No. I have worked with computers for years. My frustration is a kind of attachment trauma. Computers are probably just Harlow monkey experiments on a global scale.

Imagine you are working on the computer and your hard drive starts clicking, the screen freezes and then the only moving thing is the mouse cursor. Imagine waiting for an important e-mail, but the internet is down for no reason. What if you decide to call tech support and their first question is some version of - “is your computer / printer / router / monitor turned on?” I feel rage in these moments. Why? Because I cannot fix the problem, I can't get someone to help, and it makes no damn sense!

How should we describe our experience in such moments? People feel more harm from loss than reward from an equal gain. Aren’t we better off looking for the blessing, the benefit, the reward, the silver-lining, and avoiding the recognition of loss? We try to spin our story of the experience. We hope to create some emotional gain and limit possible harm. Modern pop-psych, aspirational descriptions do so:

• The computer problem is just a challenge to overcome.
• The internet chat boards are very helpful with computer troubles.
• In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter.

We split off the painful qualities of adverse events. What if we use realistic terms such as “victim” or “helpless?” We feel unnerved. We rebel against the label “victim” even as we feel self-pity. We grasp for affirmative terms, such as “resource” or “capacity.”

If we don’t know where we hurt, how can we care for ourselves? Our hurt is where the Furies are, and that is where we work.

Connie Jones, a great friend and occasional writing partner, in her own words:

When I awoke I couldn’t speak. I was mute. And although I was back on earth, I was also somewhere else. I felt like I was being given a choice, whether to stay with God and my sister, or come back to my family.



For a year I didn’t speak until, I believe, I made the decision to come back and use my voice to tell people about the experience I had with God. I felt God had come through for me and I wanted to come through for God, to come back and tell people he was real and his love was real. How amazing for a mute to be a voice for God!



Today, at age 56, I want people to know that the dark night of the soul doesn’t have the final say. My family was filled with despair and brokenness. There is so much pain in the world. I want people to know that God really does love you and is there for you.

Connie's full story is at Jennifer Skiff's website - "God Stories".

Connie gave me a ton of help with Furies! She's awesome.

The science of our complex human nature is unravelling the mysteries of how we create and change experience. Furies! leverages this growing knowledge to examine how harsh events cause emotional distress and intense suffering. This book, full of examples, shows how we can change these painful experiences, create well-being and enable personal growth.

Download this free book now. Enjoy the message of hope. If you don't, you are a scaredy-cat.

Jonah Lehrer, broadening the discussion:

And that's why relaxation and happiness are so helpful: these moods make us more likely to direct the spotlight of attention inwards, so that we become better able to eavesdrop on the quiet yet innovative thoughts we often overlook. (That's why so many of my best ideas often come during warm showers.) In contrast, when people are diligently focused (and perhaps a little melancholy), their attention tends to be directed outwards, towards the details of the problem they're trying to solve. While this pattern of attention is necessary when solving problems analytically, it actually prevents us from detecting those unlikely connections that lead to insights and epiphanies. (William James referred to insights as emanating from the peripheral "fringe" of consciousness, which is why they're so easy to ignore when we're staring straight ahead.)

Jonah Lehrer, in his own defense:

Obviously, it will always be difficult to precisely estimate the percentage of people suffering from a condition over a long period of time. For one thing, the diagnosis of major depressive disorder is itself in flux. However, I think there are good reasons to believe that the standard estimate of 20 percent is at the low end of the spectrum, especially given current trends. Since 1980, the diagnosis of depression has been rapidly increasing across every segment of the population. To take but one example: between 1992 and 1998 there was a 107 percent increase in depression among the elderly.

I read the NYTime's article in a more general sense, rather than focus on clinical depression. Lehrer did mean to discussion clinical depression directly. No wonder such a pot was stirred.

As you can imagine, this is a difficult subject to write about, in large part because the facts themselves are so contested. As demonstrated in this widely cited survey, patients with major depressive disorder exist on a continuum of severity, from mild to severe, making it ridiculous to suggest that there is, or should be, only one form of treatment. If a treatment works for the individual patient that is the only fact that matters. Everything else is mere theory.

Ronald Pies:

Now, with all due respect to Dr. Thomson, I am inclined to ask, “Worth it to whom?” Perhaps the patients Dr. Thomson has treated emerge from their three-month bouts of depression saying, “Ya know what, Doc? It’s been a bad three months—lost my job, almost killed myself, and couldn’t get a damn thing done—but overall, it was worth it!” The depressed patients I evaluated over the past nearly 30 years almost never reported that their major depressive episodes had a “net mental benefit,” to quote Lehrer’s article. Most felt that their lives and souls hand been stolen from them for the duration of their depressive episode...

The notion that severe depression may bring forth good things reminds me of a lecture I once attended on “fire safety” in the hospital setting.

and,

As Borchard [@thereseborchard] wisely counsels, we should not renounce or disown the part of us that produces depression—it is a piece of our messy, complex, and wondrous humanity. And, to be sure: ordinary sadness or grief may indeed be a good teacher. We should not rush to suppress or “medicate” what Thomas a Kempis called, “the proper sorrows of the soul.” At the same time, we should be under no illusion that severe clinical depression is a “clarifying force” that helps us navigate life’s complex problems. That, in my view, is a well-intentioned but destructive myth.

Clinical Depression is pathological, awful, destructive and without recompense. The discussion at hand, however, is not "Clinical Depression's Upside," or "Pathological Depression's Upside." Because the word "Depression" is used, everyone responds with made-up minds and a sense of moral outrage. Pies' post is full of invective and outrage.

What if the discussion were labelled "The Upside of Persistent Sadness?" Not nearly as catchy a title. What writer would forgo grabbing attention. Yet to me, the upside of persistent sadness is the topic at hand. Only a small subset of people who experience persistent sadness are clinically depressed.

Pies:

Finally, it is time to challenge the dubious notion that if a condition, such as depression, is highly prevalent in the general population, this must mean that the condition confers some kind of evolutionary advantage, or represents a useful “adaptation.” (Following that line of logic, ignorance and superstition must also have some adaptive advantages, since they are both so widespread throughout the world!). It is more likely that the tendency to develop depression remains “conserved” in the human genome as a spandrel—a kind of genetic hitchhiker that does nothing to improve the ride.

Pies declares depression is a spandrel. It's a convenient way to avoid a very significant question: why is the behavior of depression biologically fit? Hibernation is a form of "depression," and many mammals hibernate. We can observe long periods of diminished activity in many species. Low energy states - the behavior of depression - are pervasive. The feelings of these low energy states might be labeled "persistent sadness" or "depression." In some cases, these feelings undoubtedly have tremendous and unacceptable cost, but the behavior can still be adaptive.

"Spandrel" avoids the central question. What is the literature about depression and spandrel anyway?

After I asked my son, "please stop humming," he continued to make noise. I barked, "Stop humming!"

He said, "I wasn't humming."

This debate has changed into a moral debate unfortunately. The quickness of my response reflect such qualities. The problem is the word "depression" is used to describe many different conditions.

I did see this style of argument brewing: Big- and small-d Depression. Personally, I hope the food fight continues.

The subtitle quote is from Criminal Minds Special Agent Jason Gideon back when he was Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride

[Vizzini has just cut the rope The Dread Pirate Roberts is climbing up]
Vizzini: HE DIDN'T FALL? INCONCEIVABLE.
Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Excluding this sub-set, we are likely to find persistent sadness is part of our innate means for recovering from loss and distress.

Pulled from my response on [citation needed]:

1. Depression is really code for some maladaptive or pathological condition rather than the whole class of persistent sadness which occurs after significant loss (small-d depression in a sense). The study and alleviation of this big-D Depression is of great importance.

2. Most of the studies are of big-D Depression and probably have a disproportionately small cohort of small-d depression sufferers.

3. Big-D Depression is a condition, but small-d depression is more of a symptom.

[citation need]'s more negative take on both the NYTimes article and the possibility that rumination is part of recovery:

You’re someone who feels pretty upset about things much of the time, you’re going to think about those things a lot. So… you ruminate. And that’s really all you need! Saying that depression is adaptive doesn’t require you to think of every aspect of depression (e.g., rumination) as a complex and human-specific adaptation; it seems more parsimonious to see depressive rumination as a non-adaptive by-product of a more general and (potentially) adaptive disposition to experience negative affect.

and,

For most of the things that depressed people tend to ruminate over (most of which aren’t life-changing decisions, but trivial things like whether your co-workers hate you because of the unfashionable shirt you wore to work yesterday), that just doesn’t seem to be the case. So the argument becomes circular: rumination helps you solve problems that a happier person probably wouldn’t have been bothered by in the first place.

and,

Conversely, there’s a very real danger here, in the sense that, if Andrews and Thomson are wrong about rumination being adaptive, they might be telling people it’s OK to ruminate when in fact excessive rumination could be encouraging further depression. My sense is that that’s actually the received wisdom right now (i.e., much of cognitive-behavioral therapy is focused on getting depressed individuals to recognize their ruminative cycles and break out of them).

I had a typo-laden long comment in response. Sorry [citation needed] for the typos. A couple of my points.

It is quiet possible that however long humans have had awareness of distress, we have ruminated.

and,

So recovery from trauma would, in part, involve the abandonment of old beliefs and the creation of new ones. The emotion sadness helps break down attachments and identifications, so in that sense, depression would have value. Constructive rumination, on the other hand, would be part of building new beliefs.

and,

If you ruminate about “your co-workers hate you,” you are ruminating on the very primal concern about the availability and sustainability of social-bonds and meaningful attachments. A trivial representation does not mean the source of the distress is trivial.

and,

One point, CBT is shifting in favor of a “mindfulness” component, and rumination is no longer regarded as something to be “broken out of” or suppressed. The idea is to be aware but not reactive.

UPDATE: A link to another skeptical post about upside to depression:
Is depression an evolutionary adaptation?

In my opinion, too little of the discussion on depression focuses on whether and to what extent depression is a symptom. Much of these discussions argue depression causes harm to the sufferer. Yet perhaps it is trauma which cause both the harm and the depression. Depression could then be seen as aiding the process of abandoning lost attachments, identifications and beliefs. Depression can become maladaptive and pathological, and it is these conditions which are studied most, because these conditions cause so much harm.

Jonah Lehrer:

The alternative [theory], of course, is that depression has a secret purpose and our medical interventions are making a bad situation even worse. Like a fever that helps the immune system fight off infection -- increased body temperature sends white blood cells into overdrive -- depression might be an unpleasant yet adaptive response to affliction. Maybe Darwin was right. We suffer -- we suffer terribly -- but we don't suffer in vain.

His description of the analytic-rumination hypothesis:

Rumination is largely rooted in working memory, a kind of mental scratchpad that allows us to “work” with all the information stuck in consciousness. When people rely on working memory — and it doesn’t matter if they’re doing long division or contemplating a relationship gone wrong — they tend to think in a more deliberate fashion, breaking down their complex problems into their simpler parts.

The bad news is that this deliberate thought process is slow, tiresome and prone to distraction; the prefrontal cortex soon grows exhausted and gives out. 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 [capacity for intense focus] 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.

This theory is very similar to my recent post, It's What You Learn, Not What You Think. I assume we don't just break down complex problems into simpler parts. These simpler parts give rise to experience which is a form of testing and learning. In this manner, we also create new "justified beliefs."

Musings on Posttraumatic Growth:

Growth Needs Sadness
Posttraumatic Growth From Awe
Growth Needs Sadness

A related essay:

Peanut Butter: Able, Worthy and Wise