Depression뭩 Upside: Depressed affect made people think better.

steven johnson

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Sat Feb-27-10 08:34 PM
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Depression뭩 Upside: Depressed affect made people think better.

Edited on Sat Feb-27-10 08:38 PM by steven johnson

Research has shown that patients treated with medication were approximately twice as likely to relapse as patients treated with cognitive behavior therapy. Treating people with drugs for depression is like treating a fever when the patient has an infection.

Moderately depressed individuals appear to have a more realistic perception of their importance, reputation, locus of control, and abilities. It is an unpleasant fact that optimism is a cognitive distortion. Realistic approaches to life problems in depressed patients is a better strategy than positive self-talk.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority
http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Depressive_realism
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/comm/haselton/webdocs/HaseltonNettle.pdf

The new research on negative moods, however, suggests that sadness comes with its own set of benefits and that even our most unpleasant feelings serve an important purpose. Joe Forgas, a social psychologist at the University of South Wales in Australia, has repeatedly demonstrated in experiments that negative moods lead to better decisions in complex situations. The reason, Forgas suggests, is rooted in the intertwined nature of mood and cognition: sadness promotes 밿nformation-processing strategies best suited to dealing with more-demanding situations.� This helps explain why test subjects who are melancholy � Forgas induces the mood with a short film about death and cancer � are better at judging the accuracy of rumors and recalling past events; they뭨e also much less likely to stereotype strangers.

Why is mental illness so closely associated with creativity? Andreasen argues that depression is intertwined with a 밹ognitive style� that makes people more likely to produce successful works of art. In the creative process, Andreasen says, 뱋ne of the most important qualities is persistence.� Based on the Iowa sample, Andreasen found that 뱒uccessful writers are like prizefighters who keep on getting hit but won뭪 go down. They뭠l stick with it until it뭩 right.� While Andreasen acknowledges the burden of mental illness � she quotes Robert Lowell on depression not being a 밽ift of the Muse� and describes his reliance on lithium to escape the pain � she argues that many forms of creativity benefit from the relentless focus it makes possible. 밬nfortunately, this type of thinking is often inseparable from the suffering,� she says. 밒f you뭨e at the cutting edge, then you뭨e going to bleed.�

This line of research led Andrews to conduct his own experiment, as he sought to better understand the link between negative mood and improved analytical abilities. He gave 115 undergraduates an abstract-reasoning test known as Raven뭩 Progressive Matrices, which requires subjects to identify a missing segment in a larger pattern. (Performance on the task strongly predicts general intelligence.) The first thing Andrews found was that nondepressed students showed an increase in 밺epressed affect� after taking the test. In other words, the mere presence of a challenging problem � even an abstract puzzle � induced a kind of attentive trance, which led to feelings of sadness. It doesn뭪 matter if we뭨e working on a mathematical equation or working through a broken heart: the anatomy of focus is inseparable from the anatomy of melancholy. This suggests that depressive disorder is an extreme form of an ordinary thought process, part of the dismal machinery that draws us toward our problems, like a magnet to metal.

But is that closeness effective? Does the despondency help us solve anything? Andrews found a significant correlation between depressed affect and individual performance on the intelligence test, at least once the subjects were distracted from their pain: lower moods were associated with higher scores. 밫he results were clear,� Andrews says. 밆epressed affect made people think better.� The challenge, of course, is persuading people to accept their misery, to embrace the tonic of despair. To say that depression has a purpose or that sadness makes us smarter says nothing about its awfulness. A fever, after all, might have benefits, but we still take pills to make it go away. This is the paradox of evolution: even if our pain is useful, the urge to escape from the pain remains the most powerful instinct of all.

Depression뭩 Upside