Depression: Adaptive Mechanism or Disorder? Rethinking Antidepressants’ Role

Steven D. Hollon’s research suggests that viewing depression as an evolved adaptation could reshape how we treat it, emphasizing psychotherapy over medication.

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In the realm of mental health, depression is often labeled a disorder, a deviation from the norm that necessitates correction. However, recent studies and perspectives challenge this view, suggesting that depression may not be a disease at all.

In a new article, Steven D. Hollon, a psychology professor at Vanderbilt University, posits that depression is an evolved adaptation, an integral part of human survival mechanisms. This perspective not only reframes our understanding of depression but also calls into question the prevalent reliance on antidepressant medications.

“To an evolutionary biologist, negative affects and the symptoms they evoke are neither diseases nor disorders but rather adaptations like anxiety or pain that evolved to serve a purpose. They may be uncomfortable to experience, but they increase our chances of survival (or at least that of our gene line),” Hollon explains, adding:
“Anxiety keeps us safe from harm, and pain keeps us from doing additional damage to injured tissue. Moreover, each affect coordinates a different ‘whole body’ response (cognition, physiology, and behavioral impulse) that represents the optimal response to a given life challenge. To an evolutionary biologist, a ‘disease’ occurs when an adaptation breaks down and does not serve the purpose for which it evolved, and any function that coordinates a ‘whole body’ response to different challenges is not a ‘disorder.’”

Hollon’s argument, grounded in evolutionary biology, proposes that adverse affects like depression are adaptations that, while uncomfortable, play crucial roles in our survival. He contends that depression, much like anxiety or pain, serves a purpose by coordinating a holistic response to life’s challenges.

He notes that this view disrupts the conventional narrative that depression is a pathological condition to be chemically suppressed. Instead, Hollon emphasizes the need for cognitive psychotherapy over antidepressants, which he claims may prolong the underlying episodes of depression. This paradigm shift invites a reevaluation of both the nomenclature and treatment strategies for depression, potentially reducing stigma and enhancing treatment efficacy.

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Liam Gehrig Bach
Liam is a studying to complete his master’s degree in animal studies at New York University. He graduated from Bard College as a biology/psychology double major and completed independent research about the psychology of perceiving conservation efforts. Liam is especially interested in using feminist and queer theory to unpack current systemic issues that affect otherized, marginalized groups. When he isn’t writing, Liam is likely walking with his dogs.

7 COMMENTS

  1. Please, see what we are doing. We are forming intellectual arguments in order to kind of ‘justify’ the existence of depression and say it is not a disorder but a survival mechanism. See how far this line of enquiry is from actually understanding the primary phenomena of depression both psychologically, and also contextually, i.e. socially and historically, and epidemiologically. You do this simply by studying THE FACTS, which means the data and an investigation into the actual terrains within which the problems are known to exist, which is not in the brain, but in human consciousness itself, and the full social environment which conditions and provides the content and the influences on that consciousness. So the facts are to be uncovered and perceived – theory has only a distorting effect on reality, and in this article you are entirely lost in theory. Let me explain and justify what is meant here.

    When you actually uncover the facts which you will only do when you have a passion to actually find out the truth, rather then to do a well constructed intellectual or theoretical essay, what you see is that there is a very obvious rise in the rates and severity and longevity of depression and that this has everything to do the radically transforming, complexifying and increasingly destructive and chaotic social environment which includes factors like psychiatry and the introduction of anti-depressants which tend to turn episodic depression into chronic depression for reasons that are obvious. If you are trying to correct a response to the social environment with medication that perverts the normal functioning of the brain, you are obviously not going either to understand or to solve the primary phenomena of depression. I don’t know why any of you writers on MIA seem never to absorbed the incontrovertable findings in Robert Whittaker’s Madness in America, which compiled all the evidence socially, historically and epidemeologically, as well as an investigation of the scientific literature on rates of mental illness, to show that there is absolutely no evidence or validity established for any biological cause or role in what we call mental illness, and given that the brain is entirely conditioned by the mushroomingly complex social totality, it is clear that the brain and life system has been struggling to cope and adapt to radical changes in the social environment in the blink of an eye, evolutionarily. So the biology isn’t in anyway a causal factor in the rise of mental illness: it is one of the few stable factors in life. It is the social environment, which conditions the brain and conditions and constrains the life activity, that has changed and caused the undoing of us all and the whole world and Mother Nature. See all this as a whole and lose your intellectual blindness and myopia. Life is a whole not some tiny little theme or intellectual theory.

    It is so simplistic to imagine that depression is an adaptation, and it is so immature to try and explain it through evolutionary biology. Let me justify what I have said here.
    It is immature to try and explain depression and anxiety as a long standing evolutionary adaptation because firstly, there is no evidence that what we call modern anxiety and depression is a healthy biological response rather then a biological system showing signs of stress and pressure due to an increasingly insane social environment. Obviously there are biological processes involved in all of these symptoms but so is there biology involved in every human activity including thinking and feeling and dreaming, and if you reduce all of these to evolutionary biology you produce a ridiculously reductive and incomplete, totally perverted and deluded picture of reality by looking at it through such a radically simplistic conceptual lens. THIS IS AN OBVIOUS FACT, no?

    It is simplistic to see depression as an adaptation, because adaptation is a mere concept and non-fact. Everything can be said to adapt to it’s environment by necessity, because the environment exerts a determining impact on all things and that thing adjusts or reacts accordingly. So the notion of adaptation is not really a factual thing. What you mean by adaptation is that structure serves specific functions in the relation with environment, but if the social environment is causing emotional and psychological harm, to call this an adaptation is to take the social process and social environment and the consequent adaptation as benign when all the evidence obviously points to the contray. Not only are rates of chronic DISABILITY (not mere diagnosis) due to what we call mental health are going up in every major Western country on Earth and perhaps globally, I’m not sure, but also drug and alcohol deaths are consistently hitting new all time highs in America and the UK according to the data I’ve seen, and also gun crime, violent crime and political and social violence all seems to be on the increase. When you see the rise of depression and anxiety in this context, it looks like a natural consequence to the increasingly chaotic and conflictual social and psychological environment, but it is most obviously not a healthy response but rather the signs and symptoms of the undermining of health by the social process. If you can’t take your conceptual and theoretical specs off and see this, then everything you think and write on the issue misses the mark, including these merely intellectual, simplistic theories.

    The truth of what is is what actually is, and what actually is must be perceived and understood directly. That means perceiving and understanding your psychological and social environment, and when considering epidemeological issues like the rise of these various forms of psychological and emotional damage, to understand the nature of these damage you have only one resource, and that is an enquiry into the actual sufferers, relating inner descriptions of the psychological states to the full life circumstances, and the greater social processes and dysfunctions within which those life circumstances are constituted. You don’t do this by constructing theories or pursuing lines of thoughts – you do it by caring about the truth of the issue, and finding out by enquiring into the actual with passion. All method and theoretical assumptions destroy perception, clarity and understanding which means nothing you say has penetration, gravity, truth, depth or clarity. Nothing that is merely intellectual or theoretical ever will. You have to cite facts, data, experience, real honest attempts to use words to describe what actually is. Without these nothing we write has any value at all because it doesn’t touch reality. It only touches our accumulated words, blindnessess, errors and prejudices, and all the many lies of our culture and psychiatry, these lies being mostly theoretical.

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    • Thank you for taking the time to write this extremely intelligent and eloquent piece.

      You aren’t wrong. At all. None of us are. There are hundreds of thousands of people speaking out online against the financial, emotional, and iatrogenic harms of Psychiatry and the products in it. It is a shocking and dark part of modern society. Most of us aren’t brave enough to speak about it publicly with our face/name. The medical gas-lighting is too intense from medical professionals. It’d be worse with the media. It’s a major industry with lots of money in it. It’s not worth it.

      A couple of years ago, I discovered this website and other whistle-blower websites after being relentlessly harmed and medically-gaslit. The harm is still going on to this day and will never stop. I’ve read countless articles and taken out many books from the library confirming that we are never wrong about what’s going on in our own bodies. Quite frankly, there’s a lot of liability and libel attached to us being victimized by Psychiatry and the products within it.

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  2. from my quick glance at the Hollon article, not sure that he does justice to his mentor Aaron Beck. The latter proposed 6 models of depression one of which had an evolutionary slant, that depression was attempt to conserve scarce resources when action had not proved fruitful. But don’t think Beck saw this as an advantage, rather he advocated timetabling in potential uplifts ‘activity scheduling ‘. It is the stocktaking and re-evaluation of the investment portfolio that is pivotal in the resolution of the depression. Doubtless there are physiological correlates to depression but this doesn’t make it necessarily a disorder, and the person need not be defined by these.

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  3. Liam alleges in his personal statement that he is “especially interested in using feminist and queer theory to unpack current systemic issues that affect otherized, marginalized groups”, but then proceeds to employ Steven Hollon’s research to advocate the use of cognitive psychotherapy for ‘depression’. Why would a person require paternalistic ‘therapy’ if, as Liam quotes Hollon, the ‘condition’ is “an integral part of human survival mechanisms”? How is this article protecting the interests, autonomy, and human rights of marginalised groups using Feminist and Queer theories? ‘You are depressed, therefore you need thought-police therapy’, is a reductionistic victim-blaming theory that fails to address the gross inequalities and trauma produced by our patriarchal capitalist society. “Psychological distress occurs for reasons which make it incurable by therapy” (Smail, D, 1987, Taking Care: An Alternative To Therapy, Routledge). Please stop promoting psy-discipline Kool-Aid cocktails under the guise of advocacy and science.

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  4. Life is often cruel. People often have understandably painful sometimes disturbing reactions to life. The dangerous faux religion of the mental health industry is a death trap. I’m hardly one to tell people how to deal with life but…

    Not the mental health industry. Not even their jargon.

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