Constance was meticulous in everything she did. She was famous, and at times infamous, for accuracy at her job, for her fastidiousness in her home, and for her painstaking protocol when running the PTA. Her friends and colleagues said that while she was really well-intentioned, her standards were just too high and she was way too controlling. “You need to let go” everyone told her. But she was determined to get everything just right. And when a big project didn’t go her way, she found herself falling into into a funk. She couldn’t care anymore. It felt like the drive that had throttled her through life so far was missing in action.
But since we’re all very enlightened and tend to think that depression is nothing more than a pathological state these days, it didn’t occur to her that perhaps the depression was telling her something, and that it was telling her that walking away from unrealistic expectations just might be a healthy reaction. Not only did she miss the message, she interpreted it in a way that made her more depressed. She thought there was something wrong with her.
This is the first in a short series about the reasons that compulsive people get depressed. People who meet the full criteria for obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD), and those who have just a few compulsive personality traits, are both especially susceptible to depression, and it’s important to untangle the depression from the personality. Otherwise they can each make the other worse. Being compulsive can make us depressed, and sometimes we try to cure or cover the depression by being more compulsive. Not a good idea.
Bringing awareness to the possible function of depression is particularly important for people who are compulsive because they often endure their suffering in the territory of “high-functioning depression”–hidden from all, but painful nevertheless.
These posts will offer a very different way to understand depression, and offer suggestions to help you break the cycle that can occur between compulsive personality and depression. However, I also want to make clear that if you’re suffering from a serious depression you should consult a mental health professional for help through psychotherapy, medication or both.
Contents
The Potential Purpose and Value of Depression
Depression sometimes has a purpose. Especially if you’re compulsive or driven, it can be nature’s way of slowing you down when you’re racing too far and too fast in one direction. Correctly understood, it has potential value.
While there is much to support this idea of depression having purpose, in this post I’ll be drawing on two particular and very different sources to support it: psychologist and mood researcher Jonathan Rottenberg at the University of South Florida, and early twentieth century groundbreaking psychiatrist, Carl Jung.
Rottenberg has experienced major depression himself, and he’s published a book about the science of low mood: The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic. He shares reams of data to back up the idea that there have been evolutionary benefits for low mood. Rottenberg questions the way depression is usually understood. He asks: Why is it that we’ve invested such huge resources in treating depression, but so many people are still so depressed?
Another source of support for this idea comes from an article entitled; “Framing depression as a functional signal, not a disease: Rationale and initial randomized controlled trial”. Hans Schroder and his colleagues found that people who saw their depression as a signal with a possible adaptive function, rather than a disease, experienced “less self-stigma, greater offset efficacy, and more adaptive beliefs about depression.”
Jung didn’t have the data at his disposal that Rottenberg and Schroder did, but he still somehow understood, 100 years before, that if we look for the potential purpose in “mental illness” we can contend with it in a more holistic and effective way.
Both urge us to stop pathologizing depression and start listening to what it’s trying to tell us. It’s not a defect, it’s a message.
The Evolutionary Benefits of Depression
Rottenberg’s basic argument is that low mood has had evolutionary benefits that have helped us to survive and develop, so it’s been pretty deeply engrained in us. Here are a few of the benefits:
- It discourages destructive conflict and sensitizes us to social risk. This was really important in the conditions in which we evolved: bands of 75 people struggling for survival. The better you get along, the more likely you are to survive because you can cooperate in collecting food, and in warding off intruders, those nasty, rule-breaking goons who hadn’t bothered filling out the paperwork to join the United Nations.
- It discourages wasteful effort. When you hit a wall, when persistence becomes a liability, depression forces you to stop digging. It reduces the energy that would otherwise be wasted on futile goal pursuits such as trying to get everyone else to be as scrupulous and fastidious as you are.
- It slows us down so that we can actually concentrate more, and make better decisions about what’s realistic. This can prevent calamities such as racing headlong into projects by yourself with the absolute certainty that you have to take it on alone because no-one else will do it the right way.
People who are driven can become possessed by an idea and become rigid and inflexible in their drive to do what they feel is the right thing. It shows up in road rage, unwieldy kitchen commands, and passive-aggressive punishment aimed at those who don’t comply. It can cause unproductive interpersonal conflict, waste energy, and lead to bad decisions. Depression can lessen that tendency and can help us to slow down and question the strategies we’ve been so cocksure about.
To anthropomorphize in a very unscientific way, depression says, if you don’t let go willingly, I will force you to let go grudgingly.
Jung: Depression is the Unconscious Trying To Balance Us
Carl Jung believed that the human psyche is a self-balancing, homeostatic system. Or at least it can be if we aren’t so headstrong that we ignore the wisdom of the unconscious. So, if we get too rigid, a low mood brought on by the unconscious can force us to re-evaluate how we’re living. He believed that depression is nature’s way of taking energy away from the conscious ego, and putting it in the unconscious so that we have to pay attention to what’s happening inside.
If our attitude toward mood–and its source, the unconscious–is one of curiosity and respect, we are better situated to learn from it.
This is actually quite close to Rottenberg’s idea: depression forces us to reflect and keeps us from crashing headlong into folly.
And Now–The Reality
But is this what depression is like for you? It makes many of us irritable, waste more time, and isolate. And better concentration? Yeah, right.
Both Rottenberg and Jung would acknowledge this. The purpose of low mood can go awry, for many reasons, including stress, anxiety and lack of sleep. If any of these are present, the natural course of a meaningful low mood can go wrong. This kind of blockage could account for what Rottenberg calls deep depression, the disabling kind, as opposed to shallow depression, which can be more productive.
Rottenberg also points out that our overly ambitious culture has lead us to an epidemic of depression. Advertising, status, materialism and the idea that we can do or have anything we want, have led us to crave things we can’t do or have. It sets up entirely unrealistic expectations which compulsives are all-too-willing to buy into–and which inevitably make us depressed because those expectations are impossible to satisfy.
Here’s a fun fact that demonstrates the point: A 2005 study found that 31% of teenagers plan to be famous when they grow up. And that was before Instagram! I could be wrong, but I don’t think there’s room for 31% of the population to be famous. No wonder so many young adults get depressed in their twenties–an attempt at balance goes awry because there is no understanding of the possible function of depression.
Depression visits to try to convince us to slow down and mediate expectations. But we don’t listen anymore.
Whether this sort of suggestion on the part of the depression is effective or not isn’t the point.
Depression is not like some sweet guardian angel taking care of us. Every evolutionary adaptation has its downsides. It’s an archaic, unconscious, clumsy and sometimes brutal tendency with little differentiation or subtlety. But just because it’s outdated doesn’t make it go away.
Further, depression might have been more effective in a tribe of 75 than it is in a country of 300 million. We no longer have the community support that it might have originally engendered.
We can’t be naïve about this. But an awareness of its original purpose can still help us to deal with it more effectively.
What Happened to Chemical Imbalances?
What happened to all that brain science about serotonin, chemical imbalances and good stuff like that? Yes, some depression (for instance the kind that comes with bi-polar disorder and major depressive disorder) does seem to have a significant biological component, and medications are most effective in those cases.
But in less intense depression, the cause is more often how we think, behave, and invest our energy. Consider that in one study placebos were found to be 82% as effective as an anti-depressant, and that antidepressants are less effective in shallow depression.
Even in cases where there is a significant biological component, a less pathologizing approach to depression can help to ease it.
Why Compulsive People Get Depressed: The Takeaway
With awareness of the original purpose of low mood, we’re better equipped to understand its potential function and work our way back into a better mood. We can see where we need to slow down or moderate our drive. Our attitude toward the depression itself can determine how bad it becomes. If we are listening to what it has to tell us, its course will be far better than if we get more depressed about being depressed.
But this is easier said than done. In my next post I’ll explore more reasons that people who are compulsive get depressed, and what to do about it.
Push the SUBSCRIBE button all the way at the bottom of this page, type in your email address, respond to the confirmation email, and you’ll get the next installment.
6 Comments
Leave your reply.