The mind, as it evolves
Depression as a survival tool? Some new treatments assume so.
By Julia M. Klein, Special to The Times
February 12, 2007

Evolutionary tool

IN the fall of 2005, psychiatrist J. Anderson Thomson Jr. was treating an 18-year-old college freshman whom he describes as “intensely depressed, feeling suicidal and doing self-cutting.”

A few years before, Thomson says, he would have interpreted her depression as anger turned inward. But instead he decided that her symptoms might be a way of signaling her unhappiness to people close to her.

He discovered that his client’s parents had pressured her to attend the university and major in science, even though her real interest lay in the arts. In the course of therapy, he helped her become more assertive about her goals. When she transferred to another school and changed majors, he says, her depression lifted.

Thomson based his approach on the idea that depression is not simply a disease to be eliminated, but a way of eliciting support from family and friends. It’s a concept derived from evolutionary psychology, a burgeoning field that is starting to influence psychotherapy.

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