A
Apotheosis
Guest
The biggest problem with the conventional wisdom about mental illness is that it encourages people to ignore the meaning of the symptoms that are used to diagnose them. That is a problem because it deprives people of vital information that can help them live more the way they want to live.
The conventional wisdom about mental illness is that it is caused by genetic factors, chemical imbalances and brain abnormalities. If you believe that, you have no interest in exploring the meaning of the symptoms or listening to what they may have to tell you. Rather, you are encouraged to get rid of the symptoms as quickly as possible and pay no further attention to them.
But what if those symptoms had important information for people, information they need in order to lead healthy, fulfilling lives?
If you believe in evolution and natural selection you would conclude that the symptoms must have some survival value, must be useful in some ways. Were they not useful, they would have been wiped away by natural selection a long time ago. After all, human beings have been evolving for about 30 million years, the estimated time since humans split off from the other members of the primate family. Any human faculty which has lasted for 30 million years must be useful to our survival and well-being in some way.
If that is true, let’s look at some of the symptoms of mental illness and see how they might be useful to us.
Here are the symptoms that are used to diagnose the most common mental illness – depression. (Yes folks, the symptoms that are listed below, and nothing else, are used by doctors and psychiatrist to diagnose clinical depression). You would think – considering the conventional wisdom about mental illness – that there was a more “medical” way of diagnosing depression, a blood test or brain scan. But no, the way it is diagnosed is the doctor, psychiatrist or other mental health professional asks the patient to give a self report on the following questions:
Have you felt sad or empty most of the day, nearly every day for the past two weeks?
Have you experienced a markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all, or almost all, activities most of the day, nearly every day for the past two weeks?
Have you experienced significant weight loss when not dieting or weight gain (a change of more than 5 % of body weight in a month) or increase or decrease in appetite nearly every day for the past two weeks?
Have you experienced insomnia or hypersomnia (excessive sleep) nearly every day for the past two weeks?
Have you experienced psychomotor agitation (jittery, jerky, jumpy stomach) or retardation (slowed down, sluggish, groggy) nearly every day for the past two weeks?
Have you felt fatigue or loss of energy nearly every day for the past two weeks?
Have you experienced feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt nearly every day for the past two weeks?
Have you experienced diminished ability to think or concentrate, or indecisiveness, nearly every day for the past two weeks?
Have you experienced recurrent thoughts of death, recurrent suicidal ideation without a specific plan, or a suicide attempt or a specific plan for committing suicide?
If the patient responds “Yes” to five or more of those questions and if those symptoms are causing significant distress or impairment in social, occupational or other important areas of functioning, the patient is diagnosed with clinical depression.
So if we assume that these symptoms must have some survival value, how might they be useful? What might be going on with a person who is experiencing these symptoms? It sounds as if s/he is very upset about something. Something is not going right in her life. Something is threatening her ability to live the way she wants to live, to love the way she wants to love, to work (express herself) the way she wants to work. Something precious has been lost. He is concerned about his life, where it is going. Is it the job, the relationship, the kids, the demands of parenting, his social status? He’s not going to live forever. Maybe he needs to do something about it.
It sounds as if s/he’s under a lot of stress or, perhaps shutting down after being under a lot of stress for a long time. Perhaps this is the body’s way of protecting itself from prolonged stress. There are worse things that could happen – a heart attack, a stroke, cancer. In fact, research has found a strong link between high levels of stress and depression.
This sounds like a wake-up call, a message that something is not right and something needs to be done about it. The bodymind is saying: “Stop doing what you’re doing. Stop focusing on the outer world, on other people, on your spouse, your clients. It’s time to quiet down, go inside, take a serious look at your life, get in touch with what is going on. Stop avoiding this by drinking, drugging, working, playing, sexing, competing, winning. You need to make some important decisions or, perhaps, accept what is true about you and your life and become more comfortable with it. You need to do some inner work.”
Perhaps this is a reaction to the loss of something that is very precious to us. It wouldn’t have to be the loss of a person, a job, financial security or a relationship. It might be the loss of youth, or certainty or a sense of comfort. If something precious has been lost, perhaps it would be healthy to spend some time experiencing the pain of that loss.
How could the painful experience of loss be helpful? If I believe that all human faculties which have survived through the 30 million years of human evolution have to be useful, that is an obvious question. And an answer that makes sense comes to me. Loss is useful because it tells me what is precious to me. It tells me what I want to protect and nurture and tells me in a very powerful way that I better do what I can to protect and nurture those precious things. Valuable information indeed.
What if depression is a state of being that forces people to take a look at their social relationships and that gives them impetus to do something about changing them? That is the hypothesis of Paul Watson, a behavioral ecologist at the University of New Mexico:
It induces us to be attentive to the structure of our social network: Who has power? Who has what opinions? How do these opinions of different social partners interact to constrain or enable us to make changes in life? Depression may have a social planning function which helps us to plan active negotiating strategies in a sober, ruminative state so we can go out and actively negotiate ourselves into a better social position with the people who have power to help or hinder us.
Edward Hagen, an evolutionary biologist, has a similar idea. In the ancestral situation, when humans lived in small hunter-gatherer tribes, depression may have had value in compelling other people in one’s life to make changes that were in one’s interest – to induce the members of one’s tribe to come to one’s aid.
In his book Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore has a chapter entitled “Gifts of Depression”. Here is one of them:
The conventional wisdom about mental illness is that it is caused by genetic factors, chemical imbalances and brain abnormalities. If you believe that, you have no interest in exploring the meaning of the symptoms or listening to what they may have to tell you. Rather, you are encouraged to get rid of the symptoms as quickly as possible and pay no further attention to them.
But what if those symptoms had important information for people, information they need in order to lead healthy, fulfilling lives?
If you believe in evolution and natural selection you would conclude that the symptoms must have some survival value, must be useful in some ways. Were they not useful, they would have been wiped away by natural selection a long time ago. After all, human beings have been evolving for about 30 million years, the estimated time since humans split off from the other members of the primate family. Any human faculty which has lasted for 30 million years must be useful to our survival and well-being in some way.
If that is true, let’s look at some of the symptoms of mental illness and see how they might be useful to us.
Here are the symptoms that are used to diagnose the most common mental illness – depression. (Yes folks, the symptoms that are listed below, and nothing else, are used by doctors and psychiatrist to diagnose clinical depression). You would think – considering the conventional wisdom about mental illness – that there was a more “medical” way of diagnosing depression, a blood test or brain scan. But no, the way it is diagnosed is the doctor, psychiatrist or other mental health professional asks the patient to give a self report on the following questions:
Have you felt sad or empty most of the day, nearly every day for the past two weeks?
Have you experienced a markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all, or almost all, activities most of the day, nearly every day for the past two weeks?
Have you experienced significant weight loss when not dieting or weight gain (a change of more than 5 % of body weight in a month) or increase or decrease in appetite nearly every day for the past two weeks?
Have you experienced insomnia or hypersomnia (excessive sleep) nearly every day for the past two weeks?
Have you experienced psychomotor agitation (jittery, jerky, jumpy stomach) or retardation (slowed down, sluggish, groggy) nearly every day for the past two weeks?
Have you felt fatigue or loss of energy nearly every day for the past two weeks?
Have you experienced feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt nearly every day for the past two weeks?
Have you experienced diminished ability to think or concentrate, or indecisiveness, nearly every day for the past two weeks?
Have you experienced recurrent thoughts of death, recurrent suicidal ideation without a specific plan, or a suicide attempt or a specific plan for committing suicide?
If the patient responds “Yes” to five or more of those questions and if those symptoms are causing significant distress or impairment in social, occupational or other important areas of functioning, the patient is diagnosed with clinical depression.
So if we assume that these symptoms must have some survival value, how might they be useful? What might be going on with a person who is experiencing these symptoms? It sounds as if s/he is very upset about something. Something is not going right in her life. Something is threatening her ability to live the way she wants to live, to love the way she wants to love, to work (express herself) the way she wants to work. Something precious has been lost. He is concerned about his life, where it is going. Is it the job, the relationship, the kids, the demands of parenting, his social status? He’s not going to live forever. Maybe he needs to do something about it.
It sounds as if s/he’s under a lot of stress or, perhaps shutting down after being under a lot of stress for a long time. Perhaps this is the body’s way of protecting itself from prolonged stress. There are worse things that could happen – a heart attack, a stroke, cancer. In fact, research has found a strong link between high levels of stress and depression.
This sounds like a wake-up call, a message that something is not right and something needs to be done about it. The bodymind is saying: “Stop doing what you’re doing. Stop focusing on the outer world, on other people, on your spouse, your clients. It’s time to quiet down, go inside, take a serious look at your life, get in touch with what is going on. Stop avoiding this by drinking, drugging, working, playing, sexing, competing, winning. You need to make some important decisions or, perhaps, accept what is true about you and your life and become more comfortable with it. You need to do some inner work.”
Perhaps this is a reaction to the loss of something that is very precious to us. It wouldn’t have to be the loss of a person, a job, financial security or a relationship. It might be the loss of youth, or certainty or a sense of comfort. If something precious has been lost, perhaps it would be healthy to spend some time experiencing the pain of that loss.
How could the painful experience of loss be helpful? If I believe that all human faculties which have survived through the 30 million years of human evolution have to be useful, that is an obvious question. And an answer that makes sense comes to me. Loss is useful because it tells me what is precious to me. It tells me what I want to protect and nurture and tells me in a very powerful way that I better do what I can to protect and nurture those precious things. Valuable information indeed.
What if depression is a state of being that forces people to take a look at their social relationships and that gives them impetus to do something about changing them? That is the hypothesis of Paul Watson, a behavioral ecologist at the University of New Mexico:
It induces us to be attentive to the structure of our social network: Who has power? Who has what opinions? How do these opinions of different social partners interact to constrain or enable us to make changes in life? Depression may have a social planning function which helps us to plan active negotiating strategies in a sober, ruminative state so we can go out and actively negotiate ourselves into a better social position with the people who have power to help or hinder us.
Edward Hagen, an evolutionary biologist, has a similar idea. In the ancestral situation, when humans lived in small hunter-gatherer tribes, depression may have had value in compelling other people in one’s life to make changes that were in one’s interest – to induce the members of one’s tribe to come to one’s aid.
In his book Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore has a chapter entitled “Gifts of Depression”. Here is one of them:
