Posted by SLS on July 3, 2008, at 17:05:08
In reply to Re: ###### My Personnal Theory of Depression (8-), posted by SLS on July 3, 2008, at 15:14:39
By the way, this was not an idea of mine. An NIH investigator came up with this answer to a question I posed to him regarding the evolutionary advantage to depression, i.e. what normally desirable process is being warped to produce Major Depressive Disorder.
- Scott
> It is possible that depression in adulthood is a dysfunctional expression of what naturally occurs during infancy. Infants cry when they feel distressed. Hunger is one such distress. Of course their are others. The state of distress, were it to continue unabated, would be detrimental to the entire biological system. Most of the time, a sort of "depressive reaction" occurs after the passage of time, and the infant enters a quiet and passive state. It is a sort of short-duration learned helplessness that serves to protect the infant from exhaustion and excessive fight-or-flight activation. It protects the nervous system. In adulthood, perhaps this "quieting" reaction designed for infancy is supposed to be suppressed with maturation. For some, though, the vestiges of this mechanism never are extinguished, but instead become prominent and launch the system into a dysfunctional state of long-term depression.
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> - Scott
poster:SLS
thread:837855
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20080626/msgs/837875.html