The future looks bright (dark)!

Scientific American: Depression as Evolutionary Advantage?

The basic idea: depression equals rumination, equals close analysis of data equals better critical thinking.

There might be something to that. I have lots of experience with depression and I’ve probably spent 20% of my life going over and over a million problems that eventually turned out to be nothing, so I’m not sure useful it really is.

But my experience doesn’t disprove the study, obviously, so what the hell do I know.

This, however, stuck out to me:

Therapies should try to encourage depressive rumination rather than try to stop it, and they should focus on trying to help people solve the problems that trigger their bouts of depression.

As beneficial as antidepressant medication has been for me, none of the drugs ever compared to the benefit I got from cognitive behavioral therapy. My therapist taught me how to alter my thinking in new ways, that most problems imagined by anxiety and conjured by depression either don’t exist or are easily solvable by the appropriate application of reason and critical thinking.

Also, I might be the next step in human evolution, all because I spend an inordinate amount of time hating myself.