Psychic Pain Hypothesis
One reason depression is thought to be a pathology is that it causes so much psychic pain and distress. However, physical pain is also very distressful, yet it has an evolved function: to inform the organism that it is suffering damage, to motivate it to withdraw from the source of damage, and to learn to avoid such damage-causing circumstances in the future.
According to the psychic pain hypothesis, depression is analogous to physical pain in that it informs the sufferer that current circumstances, such as the loss of a friend, are imposing a threat to biological fitness, it motivates the sufferer to cease activities that led to the costly situation, if possible, and it causes him or her to learn to avoid similar circumstances in the future. Proponents of this view tend to focus on low mood, and regard clinical depression as a dysfunctional extreme of low mood.
Read more about this topic: Evolutionary Approaches To Depression
Famous quotes containing the words psychic, pain and/or hypothesis:
“Despite crime’s omnipresence, things work in society, because biology compels it. Order eventually restores itself, by psychic equilibrium.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“I have given my pain a name and call it “dog”Mit is every bit as faithful, every bit as nosey and shameless, every bit as entertaining, every bit as clever as any other dog—and I can boss it around and vent my bad moods on it, just as others do with their dogs, servants, and wives.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“It is more than likely that the brain itself is, in origin and development, only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserved.... This hypothesis ... would explain the enormous content of the brain as a maker or presenter of images.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)