Depression: New Thinking on Its Causes

Psychologist Marvin Seligman, author of "Learned Optimism" posits three possible causes for the increase of depression in our culture over the past 100 years:

"We’ve come to believe that we should try to banish dysphoria, anxiety, anger, sadness. But feeling bad has three crucial uses. The first has to do with the messages contained in feeling bad. Anxiety, depression and anger have long evolutionary histories in which they’re trying to tell us something. Depression, feeling sad, tells us we’ve lost something. Anger alerts us to trespass, anxiety alerts us to danger. All of these messages, by their very nature, carry pain, and it’s this pain that makes them impossible to ignore and goads us to get rid of them. They’re an alarm system, they’re not a flawless alarm system, they’re very often wrong, but insofar as we jump in and try to dampen the system, we can lose the message. So the first good use of bad feeling is that it contains messages about how our commerce with the world is going.

The second goodness of bad feeling has to do with the notion of flow. I’m not going to be sophomoric enough to stand here and try to say something about what I think happiness is, but there is one aspect of happiness that’s been well studied, and it’s the notion of flow. Ask yourselves, when for you does time stop? When are you truly at home, wanting to be no place else? This is the state that each of you probably can recognise, it’s called flow, and the conditions for it are now quite well known. Flow occurs in your life when your highest skills are matched to challenges, that quite exactly meet them. If the challenge is too high and the skill is too low, you get helplessness, depression, frustration. If the skill is too high and the challenge too low, you get boredom. But you can see that a life in which high self esteem, confidence, ebullience, getting rid of challenge, frustration occurs, one is deprived of flow. These negative emotions are necessary for flow.

The final good use of bad feeling has to do with overcoming helplessness. If you think of the thing in your life that you’re most proud of, your greatest success, it was almost certainly something that involved a large number of sub-failures, each one of which you had to do something to overcome. Each failure involves the negative emotions, to the extent we step in and attempt to alleviate, prematurely, negative emotions. We deprive our children, our charges, of persistence. What I am trying to say is that we need to fail, children need to fail, we need to feel sad, anxious and anguished. If we impulsively protect ourselves and our children as the feel good movement suggests, we deprive them of learning persistence skills. So it’s no accident, in my view, that the feel good ethic in general and the self esteem movement in particular had the untoward consequence of producing low self esteem, and depression on an epidemic scale. By cushioning bad feeling, made it harder for us, for our children, to feel good and to experience flow. By circumventing feelings of failure, it made it more difficult for our children to feel mastery. By blunting warranted sadness, warranted anxiety, it created children at high risk for unwarranted depression. By encouraging cheap success, it produced a generation of very expensive failures."

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