HN Reader

"These findings suggest that in young adults, depressive symptoms are associated with difficulty in overriding prepotent responses to actively avoid aversive outcomes in the absence of reward."

My word... Could they have phrased that any less clearly?

As I understand it: the more depressive symptoms the subjects showed, the less likely they were to actively avoid bad outcomes (unless there was some other associated reward).

Given my own experience with depression, it makes some amount of intuitive sense. For me at least, "sadness" is not wrong, but other than that it doesn't describe the experience very well at all.

When I'm really down, I can't bring myself to care about "aversive events". I might even welcome them a little bit, both because they fit my understanding better (everything is proceeding as it should be, this ant eating my flesh makes sense) and because it's an opportunity to feel something at least. For me anyway, depression is more about absence of affect than feeling "sad", and ironically it is maddening (and yet, in a sense I can't bring myself to care.)

Then again, my explanation suggests that depressed people ought to be better at avoiding harm through inaction, and I didn't see that in the abstract?

Another hypothesis is that you could stop at "Depression Reduces Capacity to Learn". It feels like all mental processing is muted, and especially any forms of change. I guess you could do a study where you have to learn to actively prevent an aversive event for someone else. But the 1st hypothesis may still apply: depressed people may still care less about harm to someone else (than if they were not depressed). But at least you could separate out whether it's only because depressed people don't care what happens to themselves.

This is exactly what you'd expect if the hypothesis that depression is an evolved adaptation for surviving no-win scenarios that can only be waited out holds.

In a scenario where a disaster has negatively affected the primary productivity of the local food web (e.g. volcano, forest fire, bolide, plague or tsunami), the groups of social species that exist in an environment are likely to engage in internal strife until the food web productivity the group subsists on has returned to normality. Phenotypes which reduce activity across the board without making any changes to their distribution of activities, just hoping for things to get better on their own, are likely the phenotypes that are most successful at surviving to reproduce within conditions of intragroup strife when these infrequent disasters occur.

If this line of reasoning bears out to correctly describe the actual selection pressures that have led to the genes for depression evolving, it follows that what we call major depressive disorder is in fact the genome seeing and carrying out false positives for needing the famine-survival strategy.

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Incidentally, I first came across the theory I'm repeating here on Steven Byrne's neuroscience blog, if you want an avenue for finding sources.

This is fascinating, but for some reason I don't care enough to read it all. So I just save it to a pdf file for later maybe!

For people interested in explanations of depression that's more than "It's an imbalance in brain chemistry" I recommend looking at the work of Lisa Feldman-Barrett. She explains how brains work¹ in computational & evolutionary terms & it's a lot better than the typical reductionist explanations in terms of chemical imbalances.

¹https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KliAI9umFyY

True depression is fucking scary. Imagine having zero motivation to create or do anything. You experience no joy. You have no future. You are trapped in this hole.

It's learned helplessness, is it not? e.g. when whenever you move toward a progress route it morphs into something threatening or otherwise aversive. Probably gets implemented in software by the bad people.

I suffered from depression and could not do anything for many years. I knew exactly what to do but could not put “pen to paper” and execute. Wish people took mental health more seriously and I don’t mean taking meds. Depression can reduce someone highly intelligent and functional down to absolutely nothing.

The article title is "Depression Levels Are Associated with Reduced Capacity to Learn to Actively Avoid Aversive Events in Young Adults". Are we sure we want to turn that into "Depression reduces capacity to learn to actively avoid aversive events"? I don't think there's good cause to go from correlation to this particular arrow of causation here. Reverse causation or a common third factor are also plausible.

I think this could be helpful in adding agency back onto victims sometimes. At least instead of actively avoiding the idea of suggesting they had any contribution to the outcome

Hence (for example) the doom scrolling wheel keeps spinning.

My personal experience is that the cost of enduring a negative stimulus is not simply a function of the magnitude of the negative stimulus, but rather the magnitude of the negative stimulus in relation to the magnitude of all other concurrent negative stimuli. This study controls the environment so that a single negative stimulus is isolated and additional external negative stimuli are minimized, but it cannot control for the fact that a depressed person also endures a constant barrage of negative stimuli which are generated internally (hopelessness, exhaustion, fear, self-doubt, etc). The magnitude of these internally generated negative stimuli is likely much larger than that of the aversive external stimulus used in this study, so it seems reasonable that the marginal relief obtained by avoiding the external stimulus may be perceived as relatively negligible, or at least diminished to the point that the cost of avoiding is greater than the cost of enduring.