The ancient Greeks used to divide people into four temperaments: phlegmatic, sanguine, melancholic, and choleric. We’ve come a long way since then. We no longer fit into little neat categories, and things are now decidedly more complicated. Genetics has now replaced the temperaments, and there are far more than four genes to contend with.
Everyone has a different genetic profile, and these profiles are a bit like canvases on which mental states are painted. The genetic qualities of the canvas determines how certain colors — like the dark hues of depression and anxiety, or the warm tones of happiness — are expressed in a person’s life. Some people have canvases that favor darker colors, other people have canvases which favor lighter colors.
Your personal biology, your unique blend of genes, provides you with the form and quality of your canvas. However, environmental factors will bend, twist, break, and mend this canvas into different shapes. It’s this combination of nurture and nature that will ultimately determine the quality of your experiences.
Depression will be painted differently depending on the canvas it finds itself on. There is no single image of depression. That’s one of the reasons why different drugs work differently on different people. Despite the symptomatic similarities that depressed people share, each case is unique, because each canvas is unique.
Let’s consider five factors that will help determine the nature of your depression. These five factors can also shed light on different mental states, like happiness, anxiety, and anger. Each of them twists your canvas in a different direction, leaving you with different experiences.
1. Genetic factors
The genes you inherit play a large role in determining the experiences you have. Some genes that may play a role in regulating depression are 5-HTT, monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) gene, and COMT. In time, we’ll have a fuller understanding of these genetic variables.
It will be years before we have an understanding of how our genes combine to create our human experiences. Despite the existence of genetic profiling services like 23andme.com, we are still a long way off to understanding the very building blocks which predispose us to conditions like depression. For this reason, though genetic factors are perhaps the most important in causing depression, they are also currently the least understood.
You’re more likely to spend money on expensive, high-status items after being reminded of a time in your life when someone had power over you. At least, that’s what a recent study suggests.
In three experiments, the authors asked participants to either describe a situation where they had power over another person or one in which someone had power over them. Then the researchers showed them items and asked how much they would be willing to pay.
After recalling situations where they were powerless, participants were willing to pay more for items that signal status, like silk ties and fur coats, but not products like minivans and dryers. They also agreed to pay more for a framed picture of their university if it was portrayed as rare and exclusive.
One lesson to gleam from these experiments is that our feelings are very much context dependent. The researchers were able to elicit a state of social insecurity in their subjects only through asking a few carefully designed questions.
Searching your way to better health: How I got rid of panic attacks.
Filed Under Overcome Depression, Personal Stories | Sep 2, MDT 12:37 pm
Years ago, I underwent a period of frequent and intense panic attacks. At the time, I had no idea what was happening to me. Eventually, after one particularly bad episode, I took a trip to the E.R room of a local hospital. It was late at night, and the doctor who saw me admitted that he wasn’t really equipped to deal with mental health issues. He tried to give me a diagnosis, but what he came up with was less than satisfying. He thought I might have been having a schizophrenic episode, and I knew that I most definitely wasn’t.
He asked me to wait until they could call in a psychiatrist. After several hours of dicking around the gloomy interiors of this rather decrepit hospital, a psychiatrist finally showed up — and she was absolutely, utterly, and completely terrible. She made it abundantly clear that she didn’t want to be there, and after a few cursory questions she immediately asked me if I wanted any drugs. I told her no thank you, and then she basically kicked me out of her squalid little office.
Dr. Google Provides A Diagnosis
I decided that since these doctors didn’t know what the hell they were doing, I’d have to diagnose myself. When I got back home, I went online and entered some of my symptoms into Google — shakiness, rapid heart beats, shortness of breath, and nausea. I started browsing through various conditions, and through a process of elimination I realized I was having panic attacks.
Burning incense reduces anxiety, depression
Filed Under Beat Anxiety, Overcome Depression | Aug 7, MDT 12:36 pm
This is an interesting study from a few months back; apparently, burning frankincense activates ion channels in the brain which help alleviate depression and anxiety.
Burning incense is a common religious practice in many parts of the world, and this study provides some insight into how the practice might actually rally our spirits in a physical sense. It also provides us with one more technique for improving the quality of our lives.
From the article comes this quote which is particularly revealing:
“We found that incensole acetate, a Boswellia resin constituent, when tested in mice lowers anxiety and causes antidepressive-like behavior. Apparently, most present day worshipers assume that incense burning has only a symbolic meaning.”
I think it’s safe to say that many religious rituals carry some kind of physical benefit to those who practice them. From an evolutionary perspective, it’s unlikely that people would continue behaving in certain ways, generation after generation, unless those behaviors conferred some kind of survival benefit on to those who did them.
There’s a fair amount of research which points towards the health benefits of certain religious rituals, such as prayer and meditation. Now we can add burning incense to the mix. For those of us of a more secular bent, we can still benefit from these practices without having to invest them with a specific ideology.
In time, scientists will develop a new class of drugs based on the properties of frankincense, but for now, burning regular incense remains an affordable and healthy way of raising spirits — one that doesn’t require a prescription.
Depression through the lens of evolutionary psychology
Filed Under Overcome Depression | Aug 6, MDT 12:29 pm
Humans have only just begun living in large groups. This experiment, in which millions of people congregate in large, dehumanizing, and anonymous environments, is foreign to how the vast majority of our ancestors lived.
Now there’s a rising chorus of psychologists who claim that the root of so many of our mental conditions can be found in this disconnect between how we’re meant to live and how we’re actually living.
In one interesting article from the Toronto Star, evolutionary psychologist Dr. Stephen Ilardi talks about a form of therapy he’s developed to help people manage their depression. This treatment involves group therapy sessions and life-style changes that bring patients closer to living the kind of lives humans used to have before we became city-bound. That means better nutrition, better sleep, more exercise, more light, more activity, less rumination, and more positive social interaction.
Read the results of his treatment for yourself:
The results of the 14-week regimen so far have been encouraging. In a continuing study of 79 patients, with two-thirds assigned to his therapy and the rest to a control group treated mainly with antidepressant medication or traditional psychotherapy, Ilardi reports a 74 per cent favourable response, compared with 16 per cent for the controls.
In other words, people were nearly five times more likely to respond favourably to his evolutionary inspired treatment than they were to medication and traditional psychotherapy.
Adjusting to a sick world won’t make us healthy; the only way to prosper in our society is by rejecting it’s demands and listening to those of our bodies.
Some people will prosper in a society such as ours; the people at the very, very top do incredibly well. And in terms of breeding , there does seem to be some real advantages to the way we live. However, in terms of quality of life, in terms of personal satisfaction, we have taken a remarkable step backwards in some respects. We don’t have to tolerate these retrograde arrangements, though changing them may prove difficult since some powerful sectors of our society benefit from the very things which make so many of us sick. This relationship, in which the few benefit from the suffering of the many, isn’t set in stone. It can be overcome.
Evolutionary psychology and the field of pharmacogenetics will make managing our mental states a much easier prospect, yet we shouldn’t use these sciences to help us cope with the negative mental conditions that our society creates, instead we should use the knowledge we gleam from these fields to help us make society more accommodating to the human condition.
Misery and depression are adaptive responses; we’ve adapted them in order to help us survive in our current environment. If we want to get rid of them in a permanent manner, we need to get rid of the environmental factors that lead to their creation.
- The Posts of 2008
- In 2009, I resolve to be…
- A diet of happy thoughts
- Misery Around The Web
- Daily meditation stops wandering thoughts
- Quackery, Pseudoscience, and You.
- Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT)
- Personal Stories and Interviews, a round-up
- The Power of Posture
- Beating Seasonal Affective Disorder
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