Hello, everyone!
It’s been a while, I know.
I’ve been hibernating, and depressed on top of it. Actually, maybe those are the same thing, and we’re pathologizing it like we do everything else in our evolutionary panic at being generally unmoored socially (where, oh where are our communities? Something’s not right, and we’re pretending we don’t know it’s a need for deep connection with and dependence on other humans who value us beyond our economic utility).
Anyway, Spring is here, and it’s time to get moving again, in very many ways! So here’s what I’m going to do:
I’m going to catch up on my Wednesday republishing of Mexico News Daily articles, which I haven’t done since January — sorry! I’ll schedule them today to go out over the next few weeks, and might bundle a few, as well.
Keep in mind, these are not the political ruminations of the past, but slightly fluffier pieces, as the paper has made a likely wise decision to actually attract and keep readers.I know that we collectively don’t have time (well, debatable… we don’t have the attention span) for too many long essays, which is, unfortunately, my regular go-to.
I get it — my attention span’s not there, either. I’ve unsubscribed from many a newsletter not because they’re not really, really, good, but because the sheer quantity of things to sift through in my inbox is overwhelming.
Even so, I read a lot. Many of the things I read are very interesting, and I really like to talk about and share what I’ve read with pretty much anyone who’ll listen.
So that’s part of what I’m going to do, perhaps in “newsletters” as short as paragraphs linking what I’ve read, the idea being that they will be both easily digestible with the option for deep dives for readers, and low-pressure for me personally to create.
I won’t keep an official schedule for those but will write and send them “when the spirit moves me,” to borrow a phrase from the mystical tinges of my childhood religious upbringing that now sounds a little cringey. I don’t care: I’m in my 40s now, and I can now say things that will give younger people pena ajena (a perfect phrase in Spanish that means, basically, when you feel embarrassed for someone else). I’ve earned it!
Here’s the first installment:
Source article: Does Depression Have an Evolutionary Purpose? by Matthew Hutson, published in Nautilus, my favorite “science summarized for the masses” site. The entire article is well worth a read!
(Advanced apologies for sourcing some things with a paywall; most have a few free articles a month, at least. Speaking of, I’m planning on keeping my Substack free indefinitely, as not everything in this world has to be an economic exchange. If I get real poor or people start begging me to let them give me money, I’ll add a donation button or something.)
To me, the basic argument is that depression and suicide have (often unconscious) social purposes: getting what you need from those close to you; it’s high-risk signaling for help. Here are some of my favorite lines:
"…depression—a leading risk factor for suicide—will be used as a bargaining tool most often when others will respond accommodatingly.”
“Reacting to a social conflict with depression won’t work if the people around you won’t care.”
Like, whoa. I know this makes it sound like depressed people are using their outward symptoms of depression as a way to get attention, but again, the context of the above is evolution, not conscious manipulation. That said, I have clear memories of crying for sympathy and comfort as a child (and sometimes as an adult), often. Sometimes, we cry alone. Is that different? Is our absence also social signaling we hope people will notice?
“They hypothesized that because men are physically stronger than women, they’re more likely than women are to use anger as a bargaining tactic in social conflicts, whereas women are more likely to rely on depression. The data showed that people with greater upper body strength were less likely to suffer depression. What’s more, once the researchers took the effect of physical strength out of the equation, men and women were equally likely to be depressed.”
I don’t know, I just love it when we get reminded that we’re biological beings, animals really, and not just brains in a jar controlling a robot.
“Hagen has written about post-partum depression in terms of costly signaling: A mother’s loss of interest in the health of herself or her newborn can act as leverage, recruiting the assistance of an insufficiently helpful mate or community.”
Could this have been the root of my own postpartum depression? I had a lot of help, actually, compared to a lot of women. But a mother is the last stop, especially in a country like Mexico. Still, most women don’t have postpartum depression, even when they’re downright panicked about not having enough help… so it can’t be the whole story. Right?
“Depression usually doesn’t appear out of nowhere. It’s typically a response to adversity, with up to 80 percent of cases following major life events.”
But since the society around us tells us what counts as adversity and what doesn’t (minimizing some major things and maximizing others, sometimes to a ridiculous extent), oh my, how hard it can be to pinpoint and dig out!
“Even if depression evolved as a useful tool over the eons, that doesn’t make it useful today. We’ve evolved to crave sugar and fat, but that adaptation is mismatched with our modern environment of caloric abundance, leading to an epidemic of obesity. Depression could be a mismatched condition.”
Oof.
“Today, we’re isolated, and we move from city to city, engaging with people less invested in our reproductive fitness. So depressive signals may go unheeded and then compound, leading to consistent, severe dysfunction. A Finnish study found that as urbanization and modernization have increased over the last two centuries, so have suicide rates.”
I’ve long suspected and argued that most mental illness is more a social problem than a biological/medical one; in the absence of anything that humans might call real instinct (as opposed to biological drives for things like food, sex, sleep), psychology ceases to be relevant in the absence of social environment, right? Being social is what shapes our brains, after all. That said, I’m not against people doing whatever they need to do to feel better, which includes taking medication (which I do).
But what if the real solution is just us taking care of each other in real communities like we evolved to do?
You have a cadre of old time readers who actually read your stuff and think very highly of your writing. Don't think of ever giving up on that. It is a rare gift.
I have had clinical depression for decades, and take a med. every day. Clinical depression makes everything seem sadder, worse, harder, more terrible, that it actually is. The med. helps me deal with situations as I would as a "normal" person. But that does't mean I am immune from situational depression, which could come from divorce, death of a loved one, lonliness, etc. Depression is not something you can have at will. Maybe you can pretend to be depressed in order to receive attention, but real, situational depression needs to be dealt with and worked through.
I'm glad you are back, Sarah; I've missed you! Loretta