Comments on: Sad Hominid Arguments

By: mc

mc — Sun, 11 Apr 2004 09:26:59 +0000

I just stumbled on this article in Reason and thought a few points were rather relevant, and do point to one of the things that I find fundamentally wrong with this kind of theory of depression as “adaptive”:

I used to think that we’d made great strides in treating serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, and that we are now making progress with anxiety and depression. Not any more; the history of the treatment of mental illness is an appalling one, up to and including the present day. …

… I’ve also read the academic literature on how the treatment of mental illness is actually a form of social control for deviant or disruptive behavior. I find these accounts convincing, especially in relation to women. …

… I think there is at least some value in constant skepticism about the importance of being “normal” if “normal” means being docile and tractable. …

… There is something enlivening about being a crank, and something scary about how easily difference is labeled pathology these days. The relentless emphasis on “adjustment” that sociologists criticized in the 1950s is now so commonplace as to be almost invisible. But what’s so great about being adjusted to systems I don’t always believe in or support?

Seems to me that reducing depression and the like to an adjustment, an adaptive reaction, a simple “cry for help”, of an “extortionary” nature to boot, is just another way – like excessive reliance on medication – of sanitizing and neutralizing the anger and conflict that is at the root of depression and suicidal tendencies and the like. We turn the heaviest psychological unease into something functional to evolution and social structure, so we can safely look away from the problems it brings to the fore.

By: mc

mc — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 10:59:51 +0000

loy – yes, you’re right there about it being a poor recycling of common sense stuff (and stereotypes and prejudices, also), but so is neil. The intent of these studies seems to go beyond common sense things and posit a whole theory that is just forced into the topic. And using words like “extortionary” to describe depression is not exactly the same as talking about it as a “cry for help”, is it? I don’t know what they’re getting at by calling depression an extortion, but I too like neil cannot see how the ‘advantages’ in severe depression and suicidal tendencies. In fact, most people who are severely depressed and suicidal do refuse help or make it very hard to be helped. Evolution seems to me kind of brought in with no real justification here. “Adaptation” is another matter, no? And if there’s anything adaptive in those behaviours, it seems a very dysfunctional way of adapting. It’s about things failing and going wrong and falling apart, not people just longing for help. Depression can have so many causes, and does involve so many things from physical factors to behaviour and cultural or mentality factors so this kind of reading sounds very very reductive and poor. And useless. Except for intellectual debates and publishing books, probably.

By: mc

mc — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 10:39:57 +0000

Great, a new and cleverer way of saying that if you’re depressed you’re really just faking it to get attention. That’s such a beneficial and useful way of addressing mental illnessess and disorders, for sure.

By: sennoma

sennoma — Wed, 07 Apr 2004 03:56:29 +0000

depression has evolutionary roots: It is a survival mechanism for an individual whose status has dropped dramatically. Depression suppresses a person’s desire for food, companionship, or other basic needs — an accommodation that makes sense for someone with a low social status. Speaking as someone (else in this thread) with Major Depression, that makes almost no sense. Depression can and often does alter desire, but not need: one still needs food, even if one is too depressed to get any, and one is still damaged by the absence of companionship even as one’s perceived desire for same dwindles. In fact, such damage can worsen the depression and set up a particularly unpleasant catch-22, the adaptive value of which I cannot for the life of me imagine. (Sorry to swipe the last word!)

By: Anna

Anna — Tue, 06 Apr 2004 07:53:27 +0000

The advantage of being late to the party is that you get to have the last word… “gamble to gain greater long-term benefits.”? ” influence their social groups, focus on problem-solving”? Not in this species, not on this planet. More on the money, and making a lot more intuitive sense – last year’s Boston Globe article:

depression has evolutionary roots: It is a survival mechanism for an individual whose status has dropped dramatically. Depression suppresses a person’s desire for food, companionship, or other basic needs—an accommodation that makes sense for someone with a low social status.

By: john c. halasz

john c. halasz — Mon, 05 Apr 2004 22:28:03 +0000

I would have very much trouble construing what “non-symbolic language” would be. Even the most literal, “picture-theory” type of language is symbolic, no? And only a recombinant symbolism allows for the persistent consideration of counterfactual possibilities.

By: Keith M Ellis

Keith M Ellis — Mon, 05 Apr 2004 14:04:20 +0000

(Just making sure the blockquote tag is closed.)

By: Keith M Ellis

Keith M Ellis — Mon, 05 Apr 2004 14:02:59 +0000

“…since it is only symbolic language that allows for the consideration of counterfactual possibilities.“—JH I very strongly disagree with this if (as it seems) you are equating “language” with “symbolic language”; but it’s becoming apparent to me that you hold to a language-primacy view that is very much in opposition to my view. I think we have radically different starting assumptions about the nature of reality, or something thereabouts.

By: john c. halasz

john c. halasz — Mon, 05 Apr 2004 10:43:11 +0000

Actually, such a rant about freedom as a necessary illusion is reminiscent of Kant, though Kant only claimed to demonstrate the possibility of human freedom. I myself would derive “free will”- or, as I prefer to call it, volitional agency,- from language, since it is only symbolic language that allows for the consideration of counterfactual possibilities. I would criticize traditional notions of “free will” for their emphasis on a mastery of causality, as opposed to working with causality, and for their failure to differentiate areas of causality. But my account would mean that human agency, though real, is always a finite and conditional “thing”.

By: Keith M Ellis

Keith M Ellis — Mon, 05 Apr 2004 09:49:30 +0000

Man, that’s my rant. I wasn’t aware the Hayek said something similar. At the level of description at which the concept of “free will” is useful, it exists necessarily because we must believe that it does. Any other level of description is irrelevant. It’s a prime example of a badly formed question that far too many people grapple with.

By: John Humphreys

John Humphreys — Mon, 05 Apr 2004 06:40:23 +0000

bill – the freedom that evolves in Dennett’s world is not free will. It amounts to an explaination how a being with an evolutionary mind can “learn” take control of it’s environment. I have a theory on free will – as far as I know the theory is stupid and nobody else agrees. :) Besdies my tyipcal hayek rant about the existence of free will being irrelevant so long as we percieve it to exist – I like the idea that humans may have ‘evolved a soul’. Some small part of our mind that is not held hostage to the remorseless forces of cause and effect – answerable only to it’s own perception of itself. And yet not put there by God.

By: Keith M Ellis

Keith M Ellis — Mon, 05 Apr 2004 05:31:29 +0000

A fair criticism of both HWT and their critics is that “depression” is so poorly defined. Insofar as depression is (sometimes, in some ways) what HWT are supposing it is, then their ideas may have merit. I should say that this particular argument in this context has personal relevance—I suffer from severe, chronic depression and I am quite well aware of and struggle with the point of view that it’s “really” just a way of getting someone else to care of you. Or whatever possible personal moral failure is implied—or that Henry possibly thinks is implied—in HWT’s supposition. But I’m personally not threatened by this or take offense because “depression” is more than one thing and certainly complex and thus HWT’s ideas are interesting in that they may explain a part of it, but not all of it, and the supposed implied moral judgment against people that are depressed I either don’t agree is actually implied or, even if it is, I don’t agree that it applies to me or quite a few other people.

By: roger

roger — Mon, 05 Apr 2004 05:12:44 +0000

I’m not sure I understand the argument about depression. From the way it is stated, it seems a surprisingly Lamarkian argument – one gets depressed, depression brings about help, therefore one breeds other depressives? Surely it has to be different than that. It seems to me that if this isn’t the argument—rather, that depression is such that it creates, within a given landscape, adaptive possibilities, like getting help—then we are certainly talking about something like Gould’s spandrels—the depression itself is a disposition dependent on trauma—filling in the post traumatic behavioral space, it fullfills a self-erasing function by getting help. But why not just—call for help? Or is the argument that depression is the effect of a deeper adaptive agent, one that signals for help and uses depression, so to speak, as a signal mode? From what I know about depression, real, clinical depression, to reduce it to a call for help is extremely superficial. Depression, after all, requires an enormous expenditure of energy, much of which is spent in keeping away from people—the so called helpers. The whole ethology of depression would seem to be the opposite of a call for help. It is like saying that a caterpillar’s cocoon is a call for help – except in the case of depression, the cocoon yields a dead butterfly. This whole theory sounds unlikely.

By: roger

roger — Mon, 05 Apr 2004 05:12:37 +0000

By: Keith M Ellis

Keith M Ellis — Mon, 05 Apr 2004 03:38:47 +0000

Aramaic? Excuse me? You’re being idiotic on purpose, right? I can’t speak for Ophelia, though I’m sure she’s read Gorgias several times, but I’ve learned Homeric and Attic Greek and have translated Aristotle, though not much of Plato. I have read all the dialogues in translation.