Sunday, March 7, 2010

WORLD OF LEARNING: EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE, DEPRESSION AND DRUGS PART TWO

"Depression's Upside" Jonah Lehrer/New York Times 2/25/10

I had missed this one, so am grateful my sister directed me to it. It dovetails nicely with the articles by Sharon Begley and Louis Menand cited in a previous post on depression. Lehrer (author of How We Decide, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, and the blog "The Frontal Cortex") offers a balanced consideration of a controversial theory put forth by evolutionary psychologist Paul Andrews and psychiatrist Andy Thompson in the July 2009 issue of Psychological Review. Perhaps, they propose, depression serves the purpose of making us think more deeply and analytically. The danger is that such "rumination" can veer into obsession and major depression. Since we are focusing on what made us depressed, we can enter a harmfully recursive pattern which overloads our brains. But there is an intuitive logical connection between depression and thoughtful, even creative, use of language. When neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen interviewed participants in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop about their mental history, Lehrer notes, "Eighty percent of the writers met the formal diagnostic criteria for some form of depression."

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