Depressive Feelings and their Mechanisms (PDF)

Essay from the year 2018 in the subject Psychology - Clinic and Health Psychology, Abnormal Psychology, grade: 7,6, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen (Department of Psychology), course: Evolutionary Foundations of Human Behavior, language: English, abstract: This essay focuses on depressive feelings and on burnout. This was an essay where we had to explain psychological issues or themes from an evolutionary perspective. I explain in this paper why it is important to sometimes accept feelings of depression, it may help curb the development of clinical depression.

Generally, it is assumed in evolutionary psychology that traits which are adaptive will be selected by natural selection to be passed over to the next generation. Despite its terrible effect, I will argue that depression might be adaptive. More specifically, I will argue that we benefit from a mechanism which is of importance to us, but makes us depressive when we attend to it in a wrong way. Also, I will provide a solution to our depression problem.

That excruciating feeling after a few rough, stressful weeks of feeling extremely tired. You might not want too much social interactions anymore. You feel emotionally numb, while also feeling unstable. You start thinking negatively about otherwise normal events or people, also even about yourself. Sounds familiar? Everybody has experienced an episode in their life where one felt down. This can happen after the loss of a loved one, a disappointment concerning regarding a promotion you didn't get, the list goes on. It is a mere emotional response to some event in one's life, you can say. You come across a lot of semi-philosophical, existential answers if you google as to why people experience down-episodes in their lives.