Interesting item in Newsweek: Sharon Begley discusses new findings (discussed in Scientific American]that strive to determine if there's any evolutionary benefit to what we consider clinical depression, a subject much on the minds of certain brain researchers. The questions: is a little depression not just natural, but healthy? In scientific terms, is there some reason for the Black Dog? This implies a fundamentally different way of considering what's been termed a mental illness. Say the study's authors, "There is another possibility: that, in most instances, depression should not be thought of as a disorder at all. " Here's how Begley describes it:

Writing in the journal Psychological Review, postdoctoral fellow Paul Andrews of Virginia Commonwealth University and psychiatrist J. Anderson Thomson Jr. of the University of Virginia present research suggesting that depression is present in the species, and in individuals, for a purpose, and we're playing with fire if we try to eradicate it. In evolution-speak, depression is an "adaptation," they argue. That is, it evolved because it made individuals who experienced it fitter, under natural selection, than individuals who did not experience it. Andrews and Thomson-who is best known for research on the psychology of religious belief, and who has also studied whether antidepressants threaten love and fidelity-offer as evidence the presence of a molecule in the brain called the 5HT1A receptor. This serves as a docking port for the neurochemical serotonin, which the Prozac/Zoloft/Paxil class of antidepressants targets. Human brains are not the only ones with the 5HT1A receptor. Rats also have it.

And said receptor's important to recognizing and dealing with stress and threat, rather than leaving us (and rats) in a perpetual state of unwary bliss. "In other words, losing the receptor that promotes depression in response to stress is something evolution thought would be a very bad move. Ergo: depression is not something to be thrown out lightly." Indeed, it's suggested that depression can lead to analysis and solutions, focused thinking, and even "negative" depressive traits - such as self-isolation or loss of libido, ie the reason we take Paxil - that may serve an adaptive function.

There are some really interesting points in here: are we overmedicated? Probably - and a little sadness, as the author says, should not be the bogeyman it's become in our times. But clinical depression - either human or rat - is a dicier issue altogether. As these researchers would surely be the very first to point out, even if depression can be proven to have en evolutionary purpose, as we all know, what's good for us as humans isn't necessarily good for us as people. Then too, it seems pretty logical that plenty of modern stimuli - to say nothing of pharmaceuticals, diet, chemicals, environment - could have a hand in that depression that Mother Nature had absolutely nothing to do with. Then there's the other elephant in the room: depression can lead to suicide - which, in the small scheme, isn't helping anyone's progress. It's both fascinating and reassuring to know that there may be an evolutionary rationale for what can feel like an unfair genetic curse, and with any luck, if true, this will be of substantial use to researchers. But as it stands, I'm not canceling that Lexapro prescription any time soon.

Depression's Evolutionary Roots [Scientific American]

The Upside Of Feeling Down [Newsweek]
The Bright Side Of Being Blue [APA]

Elizabeth Wurtzel is someone whom many blame for the current vogue in oversharing and personality-driven youthquaking. Privileged, fucked up, and, of course, pretty, Wurtzel's always had enemies whom she could dismiss, infuriatingly and with some justification, as merely jealous. Although a genuinely compelling writer and a defining voice of her generation, she's someone who's always mistaken candor as a substitute for insight. And with the narcissist's blithely narrow world-view, has always ascribed a universality to her own experiences, mistaking our voyeurism for empathetic commiseration.

Most of all, love her or hate her, Wurtzel was always a professional Young Woman. And as an ambassador of her generation, Wurtzel's aging process is of more than usual interest to the public she claimed as her due 20 years ago. Which makes this Elle article, "Failure to Launch: When Beauty Fades," incredibly depressing. Basically, Wurtzel is growing older. And, in her words, "people who say they have no regrets, that they don't look back in anger, are either lying or boring, not sure which is worse." Not for her serenity and wisdom. No, she is panicking at the thought of losing the power of her beauty, her hold over (horrible-sounding) men, desperate to preserve her youthful looks ("Thank God for La Mer and Retin-A and Pilates"). As she explains with characteristic candor, she was always a beautiful child, a "hot number," a woman who traded on her looks. And she misses it. While she sees the danger and futility of valuing beauty overmuch, she can't help it: panic trumps insight and she doesn't seem eager to stop it. And it's scary to see a smart and accomplished woman so openly in the thrall of others' opinions.

In Salon, Amy Benfer ruefully analyzes this depressing meditation on mortality, and comes away disheartened. While she dispatches Wurtzel's self-deception and lack of insight with a razor-sharp incisiveness (and do read it), there is, as she points out, no schadenfreude to the exercise: it's impossible to take any pleasure in such naked unhappiness. In a way, though, we're grateful to it. While one can't help but come away from "Failure to Lauch: When Beauty Fades" feeling really sad for its author, if she wants to cast herself as a cautionary tale, we're willing to learn the lesson. Early success, education, conventional beauty, a thin body - Wurtzel achieved everything we're taught to want, indeed, helped form the modern mold of what we want. We're told all the time that this isn't everything, but it helps a lot to have that reinforced by an essay like this. Teenage girls should read it. And then they should listen to another youth icon, now turning 50. It was, after all, Morrissey who said, "age shouldn't affect you. It's just like the size of your shoes - they don't determine how you live your life! You're either marvellous or you're boring, regardless of your age."

Failure To Launch: When Beauty Fades [Elle]

Confessions of a middle-aged "Bitch" [Salon]

According to Wired, SSRI antidepressants may subtly alter the fundamental chemistry involved in romance:

"There's every reason to think SSRIs blunt your ability to fall and stay in love," said Helen Fisher, a Rutgers University biological anthropologist who has pioneered the modern science of love.

Years ago, when I was on Prozac, a friend who was also taking the drug asked me, "Can you cry? I can't cry. I think it's making it so I can't cry." She had a manic, giddy look about her. While I could, in fact, cry, I did feel that while the drug had smoothed out my rollercoaster emotions, I had become so even-keeled that while I didn't feel like shit, I wondered if it was because I couldn't feel like anything.

Wired's Brandon Keim writes:

According to Fisher, humans have three distinct but interconnected love-related brain systems: one for sex, another for attachment and another for romantic love. This is still hypothetical - nobody knows exactly what love does in the brain - but Fisher has been a pioneering researcher on romantic love's neurobiology, and dopamine indeed appears important.

Reduced dopamine levels, however, are an inevitable effect of SSRIs. Reduce dopamine, say Fisher and Thomson, and the possibility of love itself is reduced.

While I am no longer on Prozac (it's something else now), I have absolutely fallen in love. While Fisher's theory is biologically plausible, there's no definitive evidence. And I wonder if it's just different falling in love when depressed, as opposed to when not under the thick veil of despair. Could it be that when you're depressed, every emotion is so magnified that the overwhelming cascade of feelings washing over you when falling in love seems epic? When you're more level, are you less likely to lose your head? Not to say that the spark, magic and tingle of love isn't there — but is it less likely to be all-consuming to a stable individual?

Antidepressants May Thwart Quest for True Love [Wired]

[Image via Brent Moore's Flickr]

For every classroom full of kids stunned by their first sounds of real gunfire — "It was like little explosions," one student said — there's a classroom way fuller of kids in a neighborhood that looks like something straight out of The Wire, and a support group full of soldiers' wives who can't get the Army to keep their husbands from beating them, folks for whom those "little explosions" are just like your buzzing refrigerator or whatever the soundtrack to everynight life. I know, I know, boring, but why oh why doesn't anyone ever bother the connection, even rhetorically? That when you can't make sense of an act of violence, let it remind you of those you can make sense of?

"No Red Flags" Before Campus Shooting [Washington Post]
Steve Kazmierczak Profile
When Strains On Military Families Turn Deadly [NY Times]

There is a growing backlash against the pop-a-pill-get-happy version of recovery, in which those of us marginally depressed are encouraged to be more "normal" in part, according to teacher Jess Decourcy Hinds, "because observing another's anguish isn't easy." NYU Professor Jerome Wakefield (who co-authored The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder) has students coming up to him all the time asking how to get their parents to lay off the Prozac-pushing because they want to feel their emotions sometimes. And, as previously mentioned, psychiatrist Charles Barber, author of Comfortably Numb notes that emotions — even those brought on by the loss of a relationship, a friend, a job, or a family member — are normal and meant to be felt rather than medicated away.

While significant depression is bad (and requires medication and/or therapy) and it's uncomfortable to watch someone suffer emotionally, some sadness or mild depression is often actually required for some people to learn anything and grow as a person, and it's often necessary for some of us to feel inspired. Author Eric Wilson, whose book Against Happiness came out late last month, argues that "the happy man is a hollow man," but we're pretty sure he meant to say "human."

University of Illinois psychologist Ed Diener finds that there's a high-correlation between self-reported levels of "happiness" and stable, long-term relationships. His reasoning is that "if you have positive illusions about your partner, which goes along with the highest levels of happiness, you're more likely to commit to an intimate relationship." On the other hand, if you're just sort of vaguely unhappy without being actually paralyzed with ennui, you tend to make more money, achieve greater career success, get more educated and pay more attention to politics because you're trying to not be unhappy.

Being stressed and unhappy has a biological purpose, according to Diener and evolutionary biologists, who note that fear tend to force animals into action and "sadness" in mammals tends to result needed empathetic actions in others. Either way, would you rather live in a world in which the music is all Sweet Caroline and the photographs of Anne Geddes or is it a substantially better place with Nina Simone and Vincent Van Gogh even if you have to watch some of the rest of us less-creative types be unhappy?

Happiness: Enough Already [Newsweek]
Earlier: What's The Difference Between A "Real" Depressive And A Lazy Pill Freak?

Because now that anyone with a shady doctor and a Livejournal account (or, ha ha, a job actually doing this for a living) can spew out uppers-addled rants weaving together Amy Fisher and Madonna and cutting and crying fits and her own sad, sad, sad life as an incredibly hot and intelligent young writer, it's important we preserve the laws that seal her status as the very first? Because getting a 160 on her LSATs wasn't good enough for the ACLU? I don't know; suffice it to say this story was depressing, but in a kind of overall, non-specific way. That kind of feeling where you don't know quite what's wrong with all this, and that almost makes it worse, and then the whole thing becomes an unending spiral of "I hate myself because I hate my life and it's so hateful that someone like me should hate her life because I have no real reason to hate anything about it which oh god just makes it so much WORSE..." Anyway, there are supposedly drugs for that.

Coming Soon: 'Law School Nation'? [New York Times]