Fable

▲ What Upside? ▼

[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.