In this chapter we’re going to look at the possible functions of depression, or the purpose behind it. By doing this we can understand that depression is not (just) about an illness or some pathology, but evolution has actually made it possible for our brain to create these states, and we can think about why that is the case.
Let’s start by thinking about the functions of our emotions in general. Different emotions evolved because they help us to see and react to the environment in different ways.1 Emotions guide us (and other animals) towards certain important goals, such as developing relationships, or avoiding harm, or overcoming obstacles. Our emotions make things matter to us. If you didn’t have feelings about things, would anything really matter to you? Let’s look at some emotions related to our threat-protection system. As we look at each emotion think carefully about how they are part of self-protection. They are not designed to give us a hard time but actually to help us.
Think of each emotion in this list and ask yourself: ‘What does my body want to do if this emotion is aroused in me? How does emotion direct my thinking? How does my thinking differ if I’m angry or anxious or in love?’ The $64,000 question here is: are you thinking about your emotions, or are your emotions thinking for you? The honest answer can be both, but note that we often get caught up in an emotion and the emotion directs our thinking. Sometimes we haven’t learned how to stand back and not get caught up in the whirlpool and dragged into the emotion. The emotion says ‘think this’, ‘dwell on this’, ‘fret about that’ – and we simply do. But of course it is a two-way street. How we think about things, the interpretations and meanings we put on things that happen to us, can also stir our emotions.
Emotions, then, have certain functions, even if they are unpleasant and painful to us. We sometimes call threat self-protective emotions (of anxiety or anger) negative or bad. However, this puts us in the wrong frame of mind for dealing with them. They are not negative emotions simply because they feel bad: they are part of our self-protection system and once we start to befriend them we will find they are easier to deal with. Or put it this way – there are many good reasons for feeling bad. Imagine what a person would be like who did not have the capacity to feel anger, fear, disgust or guilt. These emotions are part of our being; they have evolved as part of our human nature. We can suffer various painful states of mind because we have normal, innate potentials to switch into them.
We live in a world that stresses the importance of happiness and feeling good. The problem is, you can be led astray by some of these claims because they don’t also tell you that feeling bad is at times a normal, indeed important, part of life – and can be good for you in the long term. Anxiety about failing your exam may make you study hard, or anxiety about certain areas of the town you live in will keep you away from there.
Consider too that if someone we love dies, we can find ourselves in a deep state of grief. And very unpleasant it is too, with its associated sleep problems, crying, pining, anger and feelings of emptiness. We may have learned to share these feelings or to keep a stiff upper lip, but there is, in most of us, a potential grief state of mind. As another example, we all have the potential for aggressive, vengeful fantasies and attitudes: if someone harmed your child, your inner desire for revenge could be intense. Also, of course, we all have the potential for feeling anxious. All these possible feeling states are in our genetic blueprint. There are genetic and developmental differences among us that affect how easily or intensely these emotions can be triggered in each one of us.
We can have innate potentials for many negative (and positive) emotions but never (fully) activate them. Suppose nobody you love dies before you do? In that case you might never have an occasion for profound grief, and even though you almost certainly have the innate capacity to experience grief, you may never actually feel it. If no one does you or your family serious wrong, you may never experience the urgent and repetitive nature of vengeful thoughts and feelings. The fact that many people don’t suffer certain states of mind (e.g., grief, sadistic vengefulness, depression) does not mean they do not have some capacity for them.
We can look at the helpfulness of emotions in terms of four aspects: what triggers the emotion, how intense the emotion is, how long it lasts and how frequently we experience it. There are many factors that can influence each of these four domains, so we can train our mind to work on each aspect of a difficult emotion.
One of the most important aspects of our compassionate, evolutionary approach is therefore to recognize when emotions are helpful, and when they have taken a life of their own, or when our thoughts or style of interpreting things keep us living in the shadows. Emotional systems themselves can rather overpower and ‘take control’ of our thoughts and sense of self. I’m sure we have all had the experience of being anxious or angry, and knowing in our hearts that we are probably letting our emotions run away with us, but without practice it’s sometimes difficult to rein them back.
However, you may well ask, what is the point of depression?3 The adaptive value of anger, anxiety and love is easy to see, but depression seems so unhelpful. Well, to be frank, it often is. Now one way to think about this is in terms of balance. For example, a certain level of anger can be helpful but intense anger and aggression often aren’t. Anxiety can be helpful, but intense panics usually aren’t. Although we have a basic anxiety and anger system, for a whole number of reasons these emotions can get out of balance and become too intense, too easily triggered, and last too long.
The first thing to recognize is that depression is partly linked to old brain systems. This is why animals can go into depression-like states, and scientists study those states in animals to understand depression better. We know depression is about toning down positive emotions and toning up threat-focused ones. Our key question is: under what conditions might it have been useful for animals to lose confidence, be less positive, become more threat sensitive, and become less active in their environments? When might it have been useful to have a ‘go to the back of the cave and stay there until it’s safe’ brain state?
When we pose the question in this way we search for answers quite differently than if we assume depression is simply ‘a disease’. You may already have some answers forming in your mind about when it is useful to tone down positive emotions and tone up negative ones. In fact it turns out that there are a number of conditions that can trigger these brain state patterns in animals.3 One is loss of close attachments, particularly in the young, another is social isolation, another is conflict, bullying and defeat, another is helplessness over major stressors, and another is entrapment. When you think about it, there are many situations where we can see a toning down of positive emotions and a toning up of negative ones. In all these situations, the brain will automatically shift into patterns of toning down positive emotions and toning up negative ones.
We can get further insight into this by looking at what the new brain’s abilities for thinking and self-awareness makes of our depression. How do depressed people see our world – what do our minds focus on when we are depressed? Is it love or the loss/lack of love? Is it winning or losing and feeling defeated? Is it harmony or conflict? Is it freedom or entrapment? Is it control or feeling out of control? Well, of course, it is usually the latter in each case. We know that depressed people often lose energy and give up on things; they see themselves as inferior, even worthless; they lose confidence and behave submissively rather than assertively. Just as we can ask, ‘When was it useful to get anxious or angry?’ we can ask, ‘When might it have been useful for our ancestors to give up on things, to see themselves as inferior and to behave submissively?’ There are a few answers.
Many people believe it is important for us to follow our dreams; to have clear goals and go after them. There is a lot of wisdom in this. Indeed, being able to decide on goals, the kinds of things you want in life, and committing yourself to try and achieve them is helpful. However, we all know that on this path we will have to cope with disappointments and setbacks, losses and failures. Sometimes we might even need to recognize that the thing we so dearly want is actually out of our reach and we have to change direction. We come to realize that our expectations are too high, we have been chasing rainbows and running to the horizon. This can be hard to acknowledge, and sometimes it’s very difficult to let go.
One view of the value of mild depression, for us and other animals (and keep in mind throughout this section that by depression, we are talking about ‘toned down positive emotions and toned up threat-focused emotions’), is that it helps us to give up aspirations that we are unlikely to fulfil or achieve.4 Supposing you want a bigger house or a better car. You work hard for the money, but you just can’t get enough. At some point your energy and enthusiasm begin to wane and eventually you give up and switch to another possibility; you have to tone down your aspiration. Without any internal signal that could prompt us to give up pursuing the unobtainable, we could well continue to pursue it and so waste a lot of time and energy and end up with nothing. Low mood is a ‘give it up’ signal from old brain systems. Feelings of frustration and low mood can be automatic. At times we have to learn when to override them and keep going or listen to them and make changes in our lives.
Whether the mood is a mild dip or a more serious depression may depend on whether we are able to accept giving up and come to terms with our loss, or whether we keep pursuing the unobtainable and failing. It may also depend on how our new brain, with its thinking, ruminative and self-aware abilities, deals with this loss. If we see having to give up as due to a personal failure, or rejection in some way, this will tone positive emotion systems down even further. You have probably seen this yourself. People who are able to come to terms quickly with having to give up on things and losses, and are able to move on, are less vulnerable to depression than those who struggle to let go, who ruminate, remain frustrated or angry, self-blame, and so forth.
Consider David, who is trying to date Helen. He has strong feelings and desires for her. Over a few months, he builds fantasies and dreams about how great it will be if they can get the relationship working and he tries various things to woo her. Then she agrees to a first date, but at the end of the first date, Helen says, ‘Thank you, I’ve had a lovely time but I don’t want to make it a long-term relationship; so it’s a one-off for me.’
It is normal and natural for David to have a dip in mood in response to this disappointment and setback, because it’s the end of his striving, plans, fantasies (that gave good feelings) and hopes. He must now live in a world where those fantasies and desires are not going to happen. Not only has he lost the possibility of the future he wanted with Helen, but also it is the end of the fantasies that gave him good feelings and stimulated his excitement system. Consider what David would need to do to get depressed about this. What would he think about and dwell on? And now, in contrast, consider what he could do to get over this sad but not uncommon event as soon as possible and move on.
Interestingly, we know that some depressed people don’t know how to tolerate and accept painful feelings, how to think and behave, to move on from major life setbacks. They can get stuck, in various ways. They tell themselves that feeling the pain of setbacks and disappointments is awful and unbearable, and are desperate to escape from those feelings, rather than learn how to ‘be with them and work through them’. Or they may be angry and demand that life shouldn’t be like this – when clearly life is often unfair and harsh. Sometimes people go in for self-blame or ruminating, hoping this will help them find a way to control things in the future. For some a loss might bring back painful memories of previous rejections, perhaps from childhood, and feeling unlovable. David might even make this sad situation worse. He might start to phone Helen up, trying to change her mind; or he might become unhappy and try to woo her by making her feel guilty. He might tell her he is drinking, or even that he is now depressed. There are many ways he could behave that will actually turn Helen’s positive feelings for him quite negative. She would then reject him more harshly, which will then hurt him more, which would then feed into his feelings that he is unlovable, or other people are uncaring. David probably won’t recognize that his own behavior is part of the problem here.
The point is that we can’t avoid the pain of life, and dips in mood are normal reactions to major setbacks. Learning tolerance and acceptance of life’s pain is at times the way forward. What we can do is learn how to treat ourselves kindly and compassionately to get through these difficult waters. We can also learn how to let go gently, and this means coming to terms with grief as part of life.
Coming to terms with not being able to be as we wish, or have what we want, or the relationships we want, is about grieving and our ability to allow ourselves to grieve. It has been suggested that some forms of depression are like grief. Grief can have a social and a non-social aspect. For example, think of the footballer with a promising international career who damages his knee and can no longer play. Sickness, illness (including mental illness) and injury are common reasons for changing the course of one’s life and can require a lot of adjustment and grief work. We are confronted with grief for the loss of the person we wanted to be or hoped to become. As for David above, these losses also involve the loss of a fantasy life, the loss of how we would enjoy imagining, planning and thinking about how we were going to be, how life was going to be, what we would be part of.
Responding to the loss of a loved one with pining, anger, anxiety, sadness, loss of positive feelings and motivation is the way our threat-protection systems respond to important losses. Many young animals, including rat pups, baby monkeys and human infants, can show what we call a ‘protest–despair’ response to separation from, or loss of, the mother or those they have affectionate bonds with. Commonly, at first the infant protests and becomes more active (restless, angry and anxious, and in humans tearful) but if the mother does not return the infant becomes quiet and withdrawn. This condition has been called a despair state. What on earth could be the value of such a display or state? Keep in mind that this is toning down of positive emotions and toning up threat-protection. For juveniles in the wild, who are unprotected by a parent, it is important that they don’t move around too much, get lost, get dehydrated in the sun, or that their crying and obvious distress attract the attention of predators. The way evolution designed this was to create a potential brain pattern that would tone down positive emotion and tone up negative emotion. The infant will go into a very anxious and vigilant state, which urges it to hide away.
We think that something like this brain state and pattern can be triggered in depression, because the depressed person often feels as if they are disconnected from others, alone and lonely, cut off, and, without a sense of connectedness, the world feels dangerous to them. The ‘go to the back of the cave strategy’ switches in and they lose energy, confidence and motivation to go into the world.
The mechanisms for coping with loss, which have evolved over millions of years, seem to be the rough blueprint for many of our human responses to serious personal losses. We too can go through a protest stage of feeling angry and looking for the loved one, followed by numbness and despair. Of course, most grief in humans is complex, and people can move back and forth through several phases, so I do not mean to oversimplify it, only to indicate that there are evolved mechanisms at work. ‘Attachment losses’ are painful and stressful because we are biologically set up for them to be so. Having these feelings arise in us is not our fault – but we need to think how we can help and heal them.
In some depressions the protest–despair mechanism works in very subtle ways. It is as if there is a continuous background sense of not really feeling close enough or connected enough to others, and yet desperately wanting to. Sometimes depressed people will say they have a background feeling of always ‘feeling alone and disconnected from others’. Sometimes people become depressed even though they have not recently experienced any actual major loss, but in the course of therapy it may turn out that they have never felt loved or wanted by their parents or partners, and are in a kind of grieving–yearning state for the closeness they lack.
There are always two types of parent in our heads: the one that we had, and the one that we wanted. If these are too far apart, people can experience conflicts over the one they actually had (warts and all) – and desires for the one they wanted (protecting, affectionate and understanding). If we had difficult relationships with parents, it is easy to forget that sometimes we may need to grieve for the parent we so wanted and never had, and work out how to deal with those feelings. One depressed woman, when considering this, acknowledged that she had never really allowed herself to think about the kind of mother she had wanted, because she had felt disloyal to her own (angry and depressed) mother. However, giving herself permission to think about this allowed her to grieve for the mother she had wanted. This helped her to ‘feel more at peace within myself and give up trying to pretend or hope that my mother could be anything other than she is. She can never be as I want her to be.’
Some people want to be close to others, but in their early family life have experienced closeness as associated with punishments or threats, or as something withheld or not available. Thus we can have a deep yearning for closeness with others (it’s part of our nature) but also a basic belief that we are unlovable and/or that other people are unreliable and will severely disappoint or hurt us. The depression has to do with our being in a state of wanting closeness but being unable or frightened to get it.
Relationships are major arenas for depression because so many of our desires and wants focus on them. Relationships can stimulate excitement-drive and pleasure centres and also soothing, contentment and well-being centres in our brains. This does not mean you can’t be happy without a relationship – many people are, and in fact many people today are choosing not to engage in intimate relationships but enjoy the single lifestyle.
Some people experience what is called anxious attachment. They are frightened of being rejected or abandoned; they become anxious if left on their own and angry at separations. In contrast, other people may decide that attachments to others are too painful and difficult, and so they avoid closeness. Others move between anxious and avoidance styles: sometimes they seem to want a lot of closeness and reassurance that they are loved (and lovable), but at other times they are aloof and distant. This style can be difficult for partners, who can’t always make sense of the person who needs closeness today but wants to escape tomorrow, so (stressful) conflicts can arise. All of us can have these various relating styles to varying degrees, and stress can affect them. For example, when we are under stress, we may want more reassurance and closeness from our loved ones; but when our jobs and lives are going well, and we feel good, we may want less closeness and more freedom to come and go. Lonely, ‘despair-type’ depressions can arise when it seems that we cannot get close enough to others; we feel cut off from others. When people are depressed they often feel emotionally alone and isolated; this is commonly part of the depressive experience. It can feel as if there is a barrier between oneself and others.
However, depression can also arise from too much closeness. We may feel trapped and weighed down in relationships and can’t get away, or don’t have enough space or distance from others. Relationships can feel suffocating. We might feel guilty about even wanting to get more space. Too much and too little closeness can cause stress linked to depression.
Another evolutionary approach looks at why some depressed states are associated with feeling inferior to others, subordinated and defeated. The ‘stop pursuing rainbows’ and grief models described above do not really tell us why depressed people would feel inferior or defeated. We need to consider the fact that depression can make us give up attempting all sorts of challenges and reduces our aspirations; it knocks out our optimism and ‘go for it’ attitude; it can leave us with feelings of inferiority and shame. How could this have been adaptive?
According to this approach, there are biological differences between animals who have high rank and those who have low rank. It is now known that animals that have been subordinated or have suffered a lot of attacks from others show behavioral and biological changes similar to those in depressed humans. In some very subordinate animals the stress systems are in overdrive. Some of this stress is caused by the harassment of subordinates by higher-ranking animals, but there is another aspect to it. It might not be a good idea for a very subordinate animal to stroll around as if it were powerful, competent and dominant; to do so will only invite fights that it will lose, probably being injured in the process. It is in the subordinate’s interest to keep a low profile, not be ambitious, and to look out for trouble. Toning down positive systems and toning up threat-focused ones is one way the brain enables a subordinate animal to protect itself, stay out of trouble and be socially on guard.
Some depressions, then, may be related to potential states of mind that can be triggered by certain no-win situations and/or where there is enforced subordination (feeling you have to do things you don’t want to, often because of fear; feeling that others have some power or control over you). This is a kind of ‘stay low’ mechanism. This may be a reason why depressed people often feel inferior, worthless, and at the bottom of the pile (like a low-ranking animal) and find it difficult to be assertive.
‘Subordinate thinking’ or ‘thinking of oneself as inferior and subordinate’ is very much a part of how many depressed people think about themselves. Depressed people may label or judge themselves and/or feel judged by others in ways that are not only negative but also suggest they have been allocated a low rank or status. In extreme cases, they might actually feel ostracized and excluded by other people. Judgements such as ‘inferior’, ‘unlovable’, ‘worthless’, ‘bad’, ‘inadequate’, ‘useless’ and so on are, in effect, assignments of status that give the individual a low rank in the social order.
Mood, then, is partly an energy control system that signals status and confidence. The better our (drive-linked) mood, the more confident we feel and the more we seek out those things that are important: friends, sexual partners, good employment, and so on.2 Like our primate cousins, the more confidence we feel the more we stand tall and display that confidence. As our mood goes down, our confidence slips away as if we are becoming subordinate in a potentially hostile or rejecting world, and we take a low profile. Indeed, depressed people often don’t stand tall but tend to slouch with head down and eyes averted. We may put on a front, but as our mood drops further this deception is harder to keep up; we lose enthusiasm for trying to ‘go for it’ and want more and more to get out of the way and hide.
Of course, if we are happy being subordinate (and in fact we often are, so long as those above us are nice to us, and we feel the ‘higher ranks’ will help us rather than look down on us) then being subordinate is not stressful at all. Letting others take the strain can be a good choice. The kind of subordination that is stressful and is related to depression is the kind that is forced and/or unwanted. Many kinds of unwanted subordinacy are easy to see: being bullied, for example, and/or criticized and unsupported, being treated by others like inferior subordinates. Other cases are more subtle. Darren’s wife Anne had an affair with another man. Darren concluded this was because she preferred this other man; therefore, in Anne’s eyes, he was inferior to her lover and as an inferior would lose any ‘battle’ to win her love. He became depressed, with an acute sense of being in a subordinate position (to the other man) and not able to do anything about it except be angry (and risk driving his wife away) or leave someone he loved.
To show you how, for humans, our ‘new brain thoughts’ are often involved in our sense of (stressful) inferiority, consider two overweight women. One says, ‘Well, I would like to be thinner for health reasons but hey, “big is beautiful” and I am a really nice person. I just have to keep trying.’ For this person her weight may be a disappointment, but is not related to feeling inferior ‘as a person’. But the other woman thinks, ‘Oh God, I am so fat nobody will love me. When I look at the magazines I see how thin those women are. I can’t let others see me like this. I will hide away and not go out to nightclubs or parties.’ This woman has an acute sense of inferiority and of being subordinate to other (less weighty) women. And because she hides away, she reduces input to her positive feeling systems, which then get toned down further, making her more depressed and maybe eat more – it’s a sad, vicious circle. Subordinate animals also lurk at the edges of their groups and, when we feel like this ourselves, we too might try to hide away, not going out much, which makes us more lonely and isolated. We also give up doing things that stimulate positive feelings.
You have probably noticed yourself how your moods can seem to make you behave more or less like a fearful, unconfident subordinate. One day you might just feel down. The confidence that was previously there feels as if it has suddenly gone, and you don’t feel like facing the world. Or think of the extrovert man who loves parties but then gets depressed. An invitation for a party drops through his door: he feels anxious about it, and thinks it is all too much effort. He does not go. So you can see that mood seems to be strongly linked to feeling subordinate in some way, and prompts us to keep a low profile and stay on the edge of things even when we don’t really want to be like this.
If we can learn to recognize compassionately that these inferiority thoughts are linked to this subordinate system that has been triggered, step back and decide to be gentle, kind and supportive and (as best we can) resist hiding away, this can move us forward. Whatever our source of stress, when we experience kindness, support and encouragement, we are stimulating systems in our brain that soothe the stress system. This is the story I will come back to time and again.
Feelings of exhaustion and defeat often pervade our experience of depression. The key feature of defeat is having engaged in some kind of struggle to do or achieve something, and feeling one has lost. Defeat states are designed by evolution to make those who lose a contest tone down their efforts and pleasure. Think of how losers in competitive sports behave, in contrast to winners. The winners go out on the town to celebrate; the losers may prefer to slink off home, not wanting to socialize much. Although some losers are more graceful and resigned to the outcome than others, these are pretty universal reactions, though of course they vary from very mild to severe.
Exhaustion and defeat states can be extremely painful and there are ways of thinking that make the acceptance of defeats even tougher. Some people take defeats as evidence of some personal inadequacy. This eats away at the inner sense of oneself. We may set ourselves up for this by thinking that being an ‘okay person’ depends on being successful. If so, what happens if you try for something and fail? Then, by definition, you are not an okay person. By thinking in certain ways, we can allow a defeat to make us feel like failures – subordinate and inferior. If feeling overwhelmed with exhaustion and a sense of defeat (maybe you failed an important exam or broke up with someone, or are struggling with children) then this can trigger suicidal feelings of escaping. If possible, try to recognize this as a brain state, be kind to these feelings but do not try to act on them – give yourself time to let things settle and recuperate. Remind yourself of other times you have come through; consider how others have also had these setbacks rather than feeling ashamed. If possible, talk to your family doctor.
We are often told, ‘whenever things don’t work out, try, try and try again’; or, ‘you can do anything if you really want to and try hard enough’; or, ‘if X can do it, so can you’. Sometimes this is encouraging, but at other times it is very silly advice. Sure, these slogans can inspire us to put in effort; but they can also set us up for impossible dreams and expectations which cannot be met and so will end in defeat. We need to have realistic expectations. We can set ourselves up for feelings of defeat when we aim too high, trying to be perfect and/or never to make mistakes. Since this is impossible to achieve, we will feel constantly defeated and depressed.
We can feel defeated when we look around us and compare ourselves with other people. They seem to be coping better, seem less tired or angry, or are dieting better or succeeding more than we are. Try as we might we feel inferior – and with help from the media we can get a sense that we are ‘not making it’ while other people are – leaving us feeling defeated. This is also a theme of shame, a subject we shall consider in detail in Chapter 17. Our research has shown that people who feel they need to strive to prove themselves worthy, with the fear of not keeping up, and feeling inferior, are vulnerable to depressions.
Our anger at the disappointment of a defeat can turn into an attack on the self. Depressed states of mind often focus on feeling worthless, inferior, not up to it and inadequate compared with others. The messages that others, or we ourselves, are giving us are not messages of love, acceptance and value, when we need these things most, but of criticism and put-downs. The more hostile the criticism, the more the stress system is activated. In many depressions there is a connection between feeling defeated, feeling subordinate and inferior, and continually knocking ourselves further down.
Feelings of defeat can come from chronic conflicts in our relationships that we never seem able to resolve. Often these involve much (usually unexpressed) anger, accentuated by a feeling that we always lose these battles, or ‘can’t afford’ to say what we ‘really feel’. For Fran, the conflict was with her mother. Whatever she did, her mother would always find fault and tell her how she should have done it. Fran never felt able to tell her mother what she felt about this, and developed a deep sense of being no good, and that whatever she tried to do it would never be good enough. If they did have arguments, it always felt to Fran that her mother was by far the stronger person, and exerted a hold over her. Fran often felt like a defeated subordinate in many of her relationships.
The ‘defeated depressed brain state’ is particularly likely to be activated in situations of enforced subordination and entrapment. Someone in an unhappy marriage or a terrible job, or living in a place they hate but can’t get away from, can easily come to feel stuck, with no way out. This kind of perceived entrapment is a chronic stressor. Here are two examples.
My colleagues and I have been exploring feelings of entrapment in depression, and we have found that many depressed people feel trapped. This is often associated with wanting to run away or get away. Sometimes people are simply not able to do this because they don’t have the resources or there is nowhere to go; or they may stay because they feel guilty about leaving or moving away from others. Sometimes actually getting away is helpful, but at other times exerting more control or becoming more assertive reduces the desire to escape. The key point is that strong desires to escape means that the threat self-protection (in this case) fight/flight system is constantly active. The more people want to get away, the more they are likely to be in a state of high and long-acting stress. And, of course, the more they brood on their entrapment, the more stressed and depressed they will be. This state will gradually tone down positive emotions and systems. If these feelings and brain states are getting too much and you are thinking of self-harming then do talk to your family doctor, as there are many things that may help you.
It is clear, then, that certain states of mind and brain patterns can be turned on by certain situations. There are two particular reasons for exploring these ideas with you here. First, it will help you to make sense of some of your experiences of depression. It is not just any stress that can trigger depression, but certain kinds of stress. It is stress that is related to (perceived or actual) losses and defeats, which often cause people to feel ‘separate’ from others, inferior, worthless and trapped. These seem the most crucial aspects of the stress–depression linkage. Second, if you think of depression as being a brain pattern, which exists in our brains because of evolution, and which has been triggered in you, you’ll see that depression is one of many potential states of mind; it is no more the ‘real’ you than any other state of mind one might be in. By recognizing that depression is not our fault, but is linked to how our brains work (that is why it feels so horrible), we can learn to stand back and heal this brain state. We can feel terrible pain if we break a leg because of how our pain systems evolved and work – however, that feeling of pain is not our fault – but doing all we can to get the leg fixed is our responsibility, of course.
Although life has got much easier in many ways for a lot of us (we in the West suffer less disease, famine and war than our ancestors) there are also many stresses and strains on us now that were not present as we evolved – and these, frankly, can overtax our systems. Culprits might include overworking and generally competitive lives (e.g., working long hours to keep our jobs; women competing to be thin with computer-enhanced images in the media); segregating systems (e.g., women on their own trying to cope with young children); and exclusive tendencies (e.g., poorer people being unable to gain access to the benefits that wealthier others can afford, while being only too aware through the media how much others have). Although marriage works well for many, we are not monogamous by nature. When relationships go wrong, we can feel trapped in them. Even the concrete jungles we have built that starve us of green and open spaces can be linked to depression.
In the past few years a number of books have appeared that explore this issue of how troublesome our innate needs (e.g., for love, status and approval, friendships, a sense of belonging and community) can be in modern societies – which do not always respect them.5 One consequence of this discrepancy is that our stress systems have become too easily triggered, are too intense for the level of actual threat, and stay turned on for too long. A mixture of the circumstances in which we are now living and our self-aware and self-judging thoughts contribute to this. Training our minds to move away from depression and develop more compassion and sense of connectedness is very urgently needed these days.