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.