Long live clinical depression

Jonah Lehrer has a hilarious piece in the New York Times Magazine (“Depression’s Upside”) which describes some new research framed in an evolutionary psychology vein (“The Bright Side of Being Blue: Depression as an adaptation for analyzing complex problems”). The authors depart from the assumption that, obviously, depression must have conferred on its “sufferers” over the millennia some evolutionary advantage – otherwise the genes creating a predisposition to it would have long been wiped out by the relentless march of evolution. So they conclude that the concealed usefulness of depression must consist in focusing the depressed persons’ minds on analyzing the causes of their downbeatness, and even facilitating the sustained effort that apparently lies at the heart of artistic and scholarly creativity. I have a different hypothesis, common-sensical yet maybe insufficiently falsifiable to qualify as credibly scientific. If your engagement with the larger world is choreographed primarily through input from the right hemisphere of your brain, you are likely to be more emotionally attuned to that world and to have a more holistic impression of it. As a result, your psyche may more easily crumble under the weight of the inherently tragic nature of human existence (accentuated by strings of more specific mishaps and afflictions), and you may seek to give metaphorical expression to your emotional escapades or to come up with a sweepingly counterintuitive “theory” of this or that. Of course, any such interpretation would fly in the face of the unapologetic utilitarianism guiding the researchers cited by Lehrer – a crudely self-confident existential posture made possible perhaps by the stunted right-hemisphere maturation typical of many allegedly “social” scientists. Reading their analysis of the advantages of depressed being-in-the-world feels like empathising with the efforts of a mole who has received research funding to come up with a definitive analysis of the navigation apparatus developed by bats in their efforts to move efficiently in a slightly different living environment. This is all to be expected. There are, however, at least three scary sides to this story: 1) Lehrer, whom I much admire, seems to take the theory he has chosen to popularize quite seriously; 2) the said theory apparently makes sense to the set of highly intelligent and cultured baby-boomers who still read the New York Times (it has topped the list of most e-mailed articles on the paper’s web site for a few days); 3) at least one of the two authors of the long research article cited by Lehrer has a clinical practice, i.e., has been licensed to treat living and breathing depressed patients – whose existential suffering is totally, entirely, utterly beyond his one-sided grasp.