DEPRESSION?

The Victorians had manyyy names for depression... and Charles. Darwin used them all. There were his “fits” brought on by

excitements, “flurries” leadiing to an “uncomfortable

palpitation of the heart” and “air fatigues” that

triggered his “head symptoms.” In one particularly

pitiful letter,written to a specialist in “psychological

medicine” ... he confessed to “extreme spasmodic daily nd

nightly flatulence” and "hysterical crying" wheeenever

Emma, his devoted wife, left him aloneee.

For Darwin, DEPRSSION was a clarifying force... focusing

the mind on its most essential problems. In his

autobiography, he speculated on the purpose of such

misery; his evolutionary theory was shadowed by his own

life story."Pain or suffering of any kind" he wrote,

"if long continued, causes depression and lessens the

power of action, yet it is well adapted to make a

creature guard itself against any great or sudden evil"

nd so sorrow was explained away, because pleasure was

not enough. Sometimes, Darwin wrote, it is the sadness

that informs as it "leads an animal to pursue that course

of action which is most beneficial" The darkness was a

kind of light.

the mysteryy of depression is not that it exists...the

mind, like the flesh, is prone to malfunction. Instead,

the paradox of depression has long been its prevalence.

While most mental illnesses are extremely rare.....

schizophrenia, for example, is seen in less than 1

percent of the population... depression is everywhere, as

inescapable as the common cold. Every year, approximately

7 percent of us will be afflicted to some degree by the

awful mental state that William Styron described as a

"gray drizzleee of horror . . . a storm of murk." Obsessed

with our pain, we will retreat from everything. We will

stop eating, unless we start eating too much. Sex will

lose its appeal; sleep will become a frustrating pursuit.

We will always be tired, even though we will do less and

less. We will think a lot about death.

The persistence of this affliction — and the fact that it

seemed to be heritable — posed a serious challenge to

Darwin’s new evolutionary theory. If depression was a

disorder, then evolution had made a tragic mistake,

allowing an illness that impedes reproduction — it leads

people to stop having sex and consider suicide — to

spread throughout the population. For some unknown

reason, the modern human mind is tilted toward sadness

and, as we’ve now come to think, needs drugs to rescue

itself.

The alternative, 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.