By Vithal C Nadkarni
Depression, and not inflation, is likely to be the hallmark of humanity’s future according to the World Health Organization: by 2030, the amount of worldwide disability and life lost attributable to depression will be greater than for any other condition, including cancer, heart disease, stroke, accidents and war.
Suicide, an all-too-common outcome of severe depression, already surpasses car accidents in the US as a cause of death, writes Jonathan Rottenberg in The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic.
What began as an adaptive response to life’s vicissitudes may have mutated beyond its original utility, he argues.
If depression evolved to promote disengagement from impossible goals, he adds, by pursuing extravagant “sky-is-thelimit” sort of aspirations, we are only worsening the global epidemic of depression.
One alternative is to take up a more nuanced position that allows us to ask more interesting questions about depression.
Depression is not a “defect” or acharacter flaw. But it’s not a good “given” either. One bears it not as a talisman or a badge of courage. Ultimately, as French writer Marcel Proust, who was victim of depression himself, said, “Happiness is good for the body, but it is grief which develops the strengths of the mind.”
This could also explain why Queen Kunti, the mother of the Pandavas, beseeches Sri Krishna for a strange boon of calamities, “Let my life be filled with troubles always,” she prays, “so that I may never forget thy liberating presence, O Lord (whom she also addresses as ‘Wealth of the Poor’)!”
Depression, and not inflation, is likely to be the hallmark of humanity’s future according to the World Health Organization: by 2030, the amount of worldwide disability and life lost attributable to depression will be greater than for any other condition, including cancer, heart disease, stroke, accidents and war.
Suicide, an all-too-common outcome of severe depression, already surpasses car accidents in the US as a cause of death, writes Jonathan Rottenberg in The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic.
What began as an adaptive response to life’s vicissitudes may have mutated beyond its original utility, he argues.
If depression evolved to promote disengagement from impossible goals, he adds, by pursuing extravagant “sky-is-thelimit” sort of aspirations, we are only worsening the global epidemic of depression.
One alternative is to take up a more nuanced position that allows us to ask more interesting questions about depression.
Depression is not a “defect” or acharacter flaw. But it’s not a good “given” either. One bears it not as a talisman or a badge of courage. Ultimately, as French writer Marcel Proust, who was victim of depression himself, said, “Happiness is good for the body, but it is grief which develops the strengths of the mind.”
This could also explain why Queen Kunti, the mother of the Pandavas, beseeches Sri Krishna for a strange boon of calamities, “Let my life be filled with troubles always,” she prays, “so that I may never forget thy liberating presence, O Lord (whom she also addresses as ‘Wealth of the Poor’)!”
