The Noonday Demon (74 page)

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Authors: Andrew Solomon

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The most basic animal response is sensation. The experience of hunger is unpleasant and the feeling of satiety is pleasant for all living creatures, which is why we make the effort to feed ourselves. If hunger were not a disagreeable sensation, we would starve. We have instincts that lead us to food, and when those instincts are foiled—by the unavailability of food, for example—we experience extreme hunger, a condition we will do almost anything to alleviate. Sensations tend to trigger emotions: when I am unhappy about being hungry, I am having an emotional response to a sensation. It appears that insects and many invertebrates have sensation and response to sensation, and it is difficult to say where in the animal hierarchy emotion begins. Emotion is not a characteristic exclusively of the highest mammals; but it is also not an appropriate word to use in describing the behavior of an amoeba. We are afflicted with the pathetic
fallacy and have an anthropomorphic tendency to say, for example, that an underwatered plant is unhappy when it droops—or, indeed, that the car is being grumpy when it keeps stalling. It is not easy to distinguish between such projections and true emotion. Is a swarm of bees angry? Is a salmon going upstream resolute? The highly regarded biologist Charles Sherrington wrote in the late forties, when he looked through a microscope at a flea biting, that “the act whether reflex or not, seemed charged with the most violent emotion. Its Lilliput scale aside, the scene compared with that of the prowling lion in
Salambo.
It was a glimpse suggesting a vast ocean of ‘affect’ pervading the insect world.” What Sherrington describes is how action appears to the human eye to reflect emotion.

If emotion is a more sophisticated matter than sensation, mood is a yet more sophisticated idea. The evolutionary biologist C. U. M. Smith describes emotion as weather (whether it’s raining out right now) and mood as climate (whether it’s a damp, rainy part of the world). Mood is a sustained emotional state that colors responses to sensation. It is made up of emotion that has acquired a life of its own quite outside of its immediate precipitants. One can be unhappy because of hunger and get into an irritable mood that will not necessarily be alleviated by eating something. Mood exists across species; in general, the more developed the species, the more powerfully mood occurs independent of immediate external circumstance. This is most true in people. Even those who do not suffer from depression have blue moods sometimes, when little things seem to be full of reminders of mortality, when those who are gone or those times that are gone are missed suddenly and profoundly, when the simple fact that we exist in a transient world seems paralyzingly sad. Sometimes people are sad for no apparent reason at all. And even those who are frequently depressed sometimes experience high moods when the sun seems extra bright and everything tastes delicious and the world is explosively full of possibilities, when the past seems like just a little overture to the splendor of the present and the future. Why this should be so is both a biochemical and an evolutionary puzzle. The selective advantages of emotion are much easier to see than the species’ need for mood.

Is depression a derangement, like cancer, or can it be defensive, like nausea? Evolutionists argue that it occurs much too often to be a simple dysfunction. It seems likely that the capacity for depression entails mechanisms that at some stage served a reproductive advantage. Four possibilities can be adduced from this. Each is at least partially true. The first is that depression served a purpose in evolution’s prehuman times that it no longer serves. The second is that the stresses of modern life are
incompatible with the brains we have evolved, and that depression is the consequence of our doing what we did not evolve to do. The third is that depression serves a useful function unto itself in human societies, that it’s sometimes a good thing for people to be depressed. The last is that the genes and consequent biological structures that are implicated in depression are also implicated in other, more useful behaviors or feelings—that depression is a secondary result of a useful variant in brain physiology.

The idea that depression at one time served a useful function that it no longer serves—that it is in effect a relic—is borne out by our many vestigial emotional responses. As the psychologist Jack Kahn has pointed out, “People do not have a natural fear of real dangers like cars and light sockets, but waste their time and energy being afraid of harmless spiders and snakes”—animals it would have been useful to fear in a different time at a different stage of our development as a species. Following this pattern, depression often clusters around what seem to be utterly unimportant matters. Anthony Stevens and John Price have proposed that some form of depression is necessary for the formation of primitive rank societies. Though lower organisms and some higher mammals, such as the orangutan, are loners, most advanced animals form social groupings, which furnish better defense against predators, better access to resources, greater and more accessible reproductive opportunities, and the prospect of cooperative hunting. There is no doubt that natural selection has favored collectivity. The impulse toward collectivity is extremely strong in human beings. We inhabit societies and most of us rely heavily on the sense of belonging. Being well liked is one of life’s great pleasures; being excluded, ignored, or in some other way unpopular is one of the worst experiences we can have.

Someone is always top dog; a society without a leader is chaotic and soon dissolves. Usually the positions of individuals within a group are subject to change over time, and the leader has to keep defending his position against challengers until he is ultimately defeated. Depression is critical to the resolution of conflict about dominance in such societies. If a lower-ranking animal challenges the leader and doesn’t get discouraged, he will keep challenging the leader and there will be no peace and the group will not be able to function as a group. If, upon losing, such an animal stops being self-assertive and withdraws into a somewhat depressed state (one characterized more by passivity than by existential crisis), he thereby acknowledges the winner’s triumph, and he accepts perforce the dominance structure. This subdominant figure, by yielding to authority, frees the winner from the obligation to kill him or to expel him from the group. So through the appropriate occurrence of mild to moderate
depression, social consonance can be achieved in a rank-based society. That those who have suffered depression frequently relapse may indicate that those who have fought and lost ought to avoid fighting again, so minimizing damage to themselves. The evolutionist J. Birtchnell has said that brain centers are constantly monitoring one’s status in relation to others, and that we all function according to internalized notions of rank. The result of a fight will determine how most animals rank themselves; depression can be useful in preventing such animals from challenging their rank when they have no real chance of improvement. Often, even if not engaged in improving social position, people suffer the criticism and attack of others. Depression pulls them out of the territory in which they are subject to such criticism; they disengage so that they do not get put down (this theory seems to me to have a bit of a sledgehammer-to-mosquito problem). The anxiety element of depression is then tied to the fear of being the object of such vigorous attack as to be excluded from the group, a development that in animal societies and in human hunter-gatherer times would have had fatal consequences.

This particular argument for the evolutionary structures of depression is not highly relevant to depression as we now experience it in societies that have enormous numbers of external structuring principles. In pack-animal societies, group structure is determined by physical strength expressed through fights in which one party triumphs over the other by diminishing or defeating it. Russell Gardner, for many years the head of the Across-Species Comparisons and Psychopathology (ASCAP) Society, has looked at how human depression is linked to animal models. He proposes that, in humans, success is less contingent on putting down others than on doing things oneself. People are not successful solely on the basis of their preventing anyone else from being a success; they succeed because of their own achievements. This is not to say that one is entirely free of the business of competition and of doing injury to others, but the competition that characterizes most human social systems is more constructive than destructive. In animal societies, the essential subject of success is “I’m stronger than you,” while in human societies it is to a greater degree “I’m fantastically good.”

Gardner proposes that while actual testable strength determines the animal social order, with those who are weak developing depressionlike states, in human societies, public opinion determines the social order. So while a baboon might act depressed because each of the other baboons can (and does) beat him up, a human being might become depressed because nobody thinks well of him. Still, the basic rank hypothesis is borne out by contemporary experience—people who lose rank do become depressed, and that can sometimes make them more accepting of a lower rank in
society. It should be noted, nonetheless, that even those who refuse to accept lower rank are not usually thrown out of contemporary societies—some of them, indeed, become respectable revolutionaries.

Depression is an agitated cousin of hibernation, a silence and withdrawal that conserves energy, a slowing down of all systems—which seems to support the idea that depression is a relic. That depressed people long for their own bed and don’t want to leave the house evokes hibernation: an animal should hibernate not in the middle of a field but in the relative safety of its cozy den. According to one hypothesis, depression is a natural form of withdrawal that must take place in a secure context. “It may be that depression is associated with sleep,” Thomas Wehr, the sleep man at the NIMH, has suggested, “because it’s really associated with a place where sleep occurs, with being at home.” Depression may also be accompanied by altered levels of prolactin, the hormone that causes birds to sit for weeks on end on their eggs. That’s also a form of withdrawal and quiescence. Of milder depression, Wehr says, “The members of the species who were too anxious to deal with crowds, didn’t go to high places, didn’t enter tunnels, didn’t single themselves out, shied away from strangers, went home when they sensed danger—they probably lived long and had lots of babies.”

It is important to bear in mind evolution’s putative singularity of purpose. Natural selection does not wipe out disorders or move toward perfection. Natural selection favors the expression of certain genes over other genes. Our brains evolve less rapidly than our way of life. McGuire and Troisi call this the “genome-lag hypothesis.” There is no question that modern life carries burdens incompatible with the brains we have evolved. Depression may, then, well be a consequence of our doing what we did not evolve to do. “I think, in a species that’s designed to live in groups of fifty to seventy,” says Randolph Nesse, a leader in evolutionary psychology, “living in a group of several billion is just hard on everyone. But who knows? Maybe it’s diet, maybe exercise rates, maybe changes in family structure, maybe changes in mating patterns and sexual access, maybe sleep, maybe having to confront death itself as a conscious idea, maybe none of these.” James Ballenger of the Medical University of South Carolina adds, “The stimuli for anxiety just weren’t there in the past. You stayed within easy distance of home, and most people can learn to deal with one place. Modern society is anxiety-provoking.” Evolution invented a paradigm in which a particular response was useful in particular circumstances; modern life provokes that response, that constellation of symptoms, under many circumstances in which they are not useful. Rates of depression tend to be low in hunter-gatherer or purely agricultural
societies; higher in industrial societies; and highest in societies in transition. This supports McGuire and Troisi’s hypothesis. There are a thousand difficulties in modern societies that more traditional societies did not have to face. Adjusting to them without having time to learn coping strategies is nearly impossible. Of these difficulties, the worst is probably chronic stress. In the wild, animals tend to have a momentary awful situation and then to resolve it by surviving or dying. Except for persistent hunger, there is no chronic stress. Wild animals do not take on jobs that they regret; do not force themselves to interact calmly, year after year, with those they dislike; do not have child custody battles.

Perhaps the primary source of the extremely high level of stress in our society is not these evident afflictions but the freedom offered us in the form of an overwhelming number of uninformed choices. The Dutch psychologist J. H. van den Berg, who published his
The Changing Nature of Man
in 1961, argues that different societies have different systems of motivation and that each era requires a new round of theory—so that what Freud wrote may well have been true of human beings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Vienna and London, but was no longer necessarily true of human beings in the mid–twentieth century, nor was it ever strictly true of people in Peking. Van den Berg suggests that there is no such thing as informed choice about way of life in modern culture. He speaks of the invisibility of the professions, whose continuing diversification has resulted in an array of possibilities that is beyond comprehension. In preindustrial societies, a child could walk through his village and see the adults at work. He tended to choose (where choice was operative at all) his own job on the basis of a fairly thorough understanding of what each of the available options entailed—what it was to be a blacksmith, a miller, or a baker. Perhaps the details of the life of the priest were unclear, but the way of life of the priest was fully visible. This is simply not true in postindustrial society. Few people have understood since childhood what exactly a hedge-fund manager or a health-care administrator or an associate professor actually does, or what it is like for him to do it.

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