This episode explores the link between unhealthy compulsivity and depression in three parts: understanding what depression may be trying to tell us, how the negativity bias protects us and makes us miserable at the same time, and why compulsives get stuck on the hedonic treadmill. Click here for the written version. 

Transcript

Why Compulsive People Get Depressed Part 1: The Missed Potential of Low Mood

 
Constance was meticulous in everything she did. She was famous, and at times infamous, for accuracy at her job, for her fastidiousness in her home, and for her painstaking protocol when running the PTA.  Her friends and colleagues said that while she was really well-intentioned, her standards were just too high and she was way too controlling.  “You need to let go” everyone told her. But she was determined to get everything just right. And when a big project didn’t go her way, she found herself falling into into a funk.  She couldn’t care anymore. It felt like the drive that had throttled her through life so far was missing in action. 

But since we’re all very enlightened and tend to think that depression is nothing more than a pathological state these days, it didn’t occur to her that perhaps the depression was telling her something, and that it was telling her that walking away from unrealistic expectations just might be a healthy reaction. Not only did she miss the message, she interpreted it in a way that made her more depressed.  She thought there was something wrong with her. 

This is the first in a short series about the reasons that compulsive people get depressed. People who meet the full criteria for obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD), and those who have just a few compulsive personality traits, are both especially susceptible to depression, and it’s important to untangle the depression from the personality.  Otherwise they can each make the other worse. Being compulsive can make us depressed, and sometimes we try to cure or cover the depression by being more compulsive. Not a good idea.

Bringing awareness to the possible function of depression is particularly important for people who are compulsive because they often endure their suffering in the territory of “high-functioning depression”–hidden from all, but painful nevertheless.

These posts will offer a very different way to understand depression, and offer suggestions to help you break the cycle that can occur between compulsive personality and depression. However, I also want to make clear that if you’re suffering from a serious depression you should consult a mental health professional for help through psychotherapy, medication or both.

Contents

• The Potential Purpose and Value of Depression
• The Evolutionary Benefits of Depression
• Jung: Depression is the Unconscious Trying To Balance Us
• And Now–The Reality
• What happened to chemical imbalances?
• The Takeaway

The Potential Purpose and Value of Depression

Depression sometimes has a purpose. Especially if you’re compulsive or driven, it can be nature’s way of slowing you down when you’re racing too far and too fast in one direction. Correctly understood, it has potential value.

While there is much to support this idea of depression having purpose, in this post I’ll be drawing on two particular and very different sources to support it: psychologist and mood researcher Jonathan Rottenberg at the University of South Florida, and early twentieth century groundbreaking psychiatrist, Carl Jung.

Rottenberg has experienced major depression himself, and he’s published a book about the science of low mood: The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic. He shares reams of data to back up the idea that there have been evolutionary benefits for low mood. Rottenberg questions the way depression is usually understood. He asks: Why is it that we’ve invested such huge resources in treating depression, but so many people are still so depressed?

Jung didn’t have the data at his disposal that Rottenberg did, but he still somehow understood, 100 years before, that if we look for the potential purpose in “mental illness” we can contend with it in a more holistic and effective way.

Both urge us to stop pathologizing depression and start listening to what it’s trying to tell us.  It’s not a defect, it’s a message.

The Evolutionary Benefits of Depression

Rottenberg’s basic argument is that low mood has had evolutionary benefits that have helped us to survive and develop, so it’s been pretty deeply engrained in us. Here are a few of the benefits:

1. It discourages destructive conflict and sensitizes us to social risk. This was really important in the conditions in which we evolved: bands of 75 people struggling for survival. The better you get along, the more likely you are to survive because you can cooperate in collecting food, and in warding off intruders, those nasty, rule-breaking goons who hadn’t bothered filling out the paperwork to join the United Nations.
2. It discourages wasteful effort. When you hit a wall, when persistence becomes a liability, depression forces you to stop digging. It reduces the energy that would otherwise be wasted on futile goal pursuits such as trying to get everyone else to be as scrupulous and fastidious as you are.
3. It slows us down so that we can actually concentrate more, and make better decisions about what’s realistic. This can prevent calamities such as racing headlong into projects by yourself with the absolute certainty that you have to take it on alone because no-one else will do it the right way.

People who are driven can become possessed by an idea and become rigid and inflexible in their drive to do what they feel is the right thing. It shows up in road rage, unwieldy kitchen commands, and passive-aggressive punishment aimed at those who don’t comply.  It can cause unproductive interpersonal conflict, waste energy, and lead to bad decisions. Depression can lessen that tendency and can help us to slow down and question the strategies we’ve been so cocksure about.

To anthropomorphize in a very unscientific way, depression says, if you don’t let go willingly, I will force you to let go grudgingly.

Jung: Depression is the Unconscious Trying To Balance Us

Carl Jung believed that the human psyche is a self-balancing, homeostatic system. Or at least it can be if ...