Is it an existential crisis of meaning?

Randolph Nesse, director of the evolution and human adaptation program at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, believes that there are more kinds of depression than the diagnosticians have identified. Some depression may be a useful, adaptive response to situations in which a desired goal is unattainable.

"If I had to put my position in a nutshell," Nesse has explained, "I’d say that mood exists to regulate investment strategies, so that we spend more time on things that work and less time on things that don’t work."

Many Americans use antidepressants to pull them back to "normal," but this may be precisely the wrong response. If, as Nesse and others theorize, depression is a defensive response, one that tells us something important about ourselves or our culture, it makes no sense to clip its alarm wires with drugs.

Enter the young, urban, modern, fabulously "successful" Americans who are nonetheless disconnected from things they, at the most profound level, want: nature, intimacy, a quiet, unmediated environment. There’s nowhere they can immediately go to find these things. The desired goal seems unattainable. So depression sets in as the organism adapts to the problem, searching for a way out. Searching for meaning.

Austrian psychiatrist Victor Frankl, who died in 1997, believed that there is an existential dimension to much mental illness—as distinct from, but sometimes in addition to, psychic or social or physical dimensions.

Specifically, he identified people caught in what he called the "existential vacuum." It’s not a mental affliction, but a spiritual one: Your life seems utterly devoid of purpose. No path beckons. Eventually, a kind of paralytic cynicism sets in. You believe in nothing. You accept nothing as truthful, useful, or significant. You don’t value anything you’re currently doing and can’t imagine doing anything of value in the future.

Frankl believed that the existential vacuum he described was a modern condition. Carl Jung identified it in about a third of his patients, and he and his contemporaries noted that it was different from any neuroses they had seen before.

We pump for meaning. We hope to find it in malls. As Daniel Boorstin, retired Librarian of Congress, has pointed out, Americans shop not to get what they want (as Europeans, say, do) but to discover what they want. This may tie into modernity’s new, heroic explanation about the meaning of life, which has swept aside older spiritual teachings and cosmologies. We now place our faith in a grand narrative of consumer choice, of never-ending economic growth and technological progress. But this largely excludes the spiritual dimension of human existence.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~nesse/Articles/IsMoodAdapt-ArchGenPsychiatry-in%20press.PDF

Negative thinking and lack of motivation should be especially common in situations characterized by temptation to challenge a dominant, failure of a major life enterprise, or lack of a viable life plan. They should be less common after discrete losses, even large ones. Low self-esteem

should be an especially prominent part of those depressions that arise from inability to yield in a status competition. Furthermore, if negative thinking functions partly to keep people from prematurely leaving bad situations, then antidepressant treatment should increase the proportion of people who leave. It would be interesting to see if drug treatment of depressed abused spouses makes them more likely to leave, or more likely to tolerate a bad situation. The benefits of cognitive therapy should be mediated not just by correcting negative distortions, but more specifically by increasing the person’s expectations of the effectiveness of future actions.

This perspective also suggests animal and neural models. If the brain mechanisms that regulate foraging are related to those that mediate depression, then antidepressants should change the duration of foraging time in a depleted patch, and the willingness to exert effort even when the net rate of return is negative. They might also change preferences for working hard for a large intermittent reward vs. easily getting small frequent rewards. If low mood is an active coordinated state, then the brain mechanisms that mediate it can be blocked at different points, so antidepressants should be effective via multiple mechanisms.

This perspective predicts that depression should be frequent in people who are anxious, duty bound, ambitious, or who have no alternatives, because they are especially likely to get themselves into situations in which they are committed to a major goal that they cannot give up. 98 People who lack the resources or power to accomplish their goals may be especially vulnerable. 99 Subjective well-being should be (and is) lower in those pursuing longer term large life projects, 100-101 especially conflicting ones. 102 It is interesting, in this context, to note that some of the genetic predisposition to depression is mediated by differential exposure to severe life events. 103-104

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4424543&forum_id=2#39451700)