Depression Forces Our Mind to be More Focus

Why do people get depressed? At first glance, the answer seems obvious: the mind, like the flesh, is prone to malfunction. Once that malfunction happens — perhaps it’s an errant gene triggering a shortage of some happy chemical — we sink into a emotional stupor and need medical treatment. But this pat explanation obscures a lingering paradox of depression, which is that the mental illness is extremely common. Every year, approximately 7 percent of us will be afflicted by the god-awful mental state that William Styron described as a “gray drizzle of horror . . . a storm of murk.” Obsessed with our pain, we will retreat from everything. We will stop eating, unless we start eating too much. Sex will lose its appeal; sleep will become a frustrating pursuit. We will always be tired, even though we will do less and less. We will think a lot about death.

In recent years, a small cadre of researchers has begun exploring this apparent paradox, trying to understand why states of such extreme sadness are so widespread. (The prevalence of depression exists in stark contrast with every other mental illness – schizophrenia, for example, is seen in less than 1 percent of the population.) I wrote about two of these researchers, Andy Thomson at the University of Virginia and Paul Andrews of Virginia Commonwealth, in the Times Magazine last year. The startling speculation behind their theory revolves around the purpose of rumination, the thought process that defines depression. (The verb is derived from the Latin word for “chewed over,” which describes the act of digestion in cattle, in which they swallow, regurgitate and then rechew their food.) In recent decades, psychiatry has come to see rumination as a dangerous mental habit, because it leads people to fixate on their flaws and problems, thus extending their negative moods. The bleakness of this thought process helps explain why, according to the Yale psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, people with “ruminative tendencies” are more likely to become depressed. They’re also more likely to become unnerved by stressful events: for instance, Nolen-Hoeksema found that residents of San Francisco who self-identified as ruminators showed significantly more depressive symptoms after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

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