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)
“We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
“The wheels and springs of man are all set to the hypothesis of the permanence of nature. We are not built like a ship to be tossed, but like a house to stand.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)