The sense that I’ve gotten (from my own experience, from anecdotes about startup founders, and from some of Anna’s examples) is that there’s not much distinction between “falling” and “trough,” or between “rising” and “peak.” We’re looking at a phenomenon of RAPID, LARGE swings, such that you’re basically at one place one day, and in a completely different one the next (not that the shifts happen daily—just that they’re abrupt).
In other words, the way we chose to describe it might make it seem like there’s a larger distinction, there, but I think what you’re labeling “peaks” and “troughs” are actually the same places we were trying to talk about.
Melancholia, mania and severe depression might be a bit different, but with normal episodes I think the upswing is when you are solving problems without issues. The turning point at the top is when you come across a complex problem which matters to you and that you are unable to solve. The downswing and slide into depression is your body’s way of moving into a kind of analytical mode. Like fever is induced to fight infection, depression is induced to fight despair. I think that despair is separate to the depression. It is the perceived lack of control over negative events, we often call it hopelessness. Depression, on the other hand, is the induced state of mind.
The reason why such mood swings as you describe might happen with startup founders, for example, is that they face complex problems that they care deeply about and that have high social costs if they fail at them. The idea I am presenting here gets to be quite complicated in practice because the cause of the depression is the perceived complexity of the problem, perceived ability to solve it and perceived social costs with failing. These all depend on the perceiver and we don’t see the world as it is, we see they world as we are. It is possible that someone might slide into depression because of misttributed emotions, wrong beliefs etc.
Depression might also be too strong a word. Perhaps, ‘sad’ is better. I don’t know. I am referring to ‘depression’ as the down ward sections in your mood swings figure.
I am basing what I wrote above on my understanding of this paper which posits that depression is an evolved stress response mechanism. This claim makes sense if you believe the broaden and build theory. The paper makes the following claims
Complex Problems Trigger Depressed Affect. The analytical rumination (AR) hypothesis proposes that depressed affect is triggered by problems: (1) that are complex (analytically difficult); and (2) that affected fitness in evolutionary environments. [...] One effect of sad or depressed mood is to promote an analytical reasoning style in which greater attention is paid to detail and information is processed more slowly, methodically, thoroughly, and in smaller chunks [...] Complex social problems may be the primary evolutionarily relevant trigger of depression in human beings
Depression coordinates a suite of changes in body systems that promote rumination, the evolved function of which is to analyze the triggering problem. [...]Analysis is time consuming and requires sustained processing, so it is susceptible to disruption, which interferes with problem-solving. Depression induces changes in body systems, producing effects that facilitate analytical rumination by reducing disruption [...]Specifically, depressed affect: (1) activates neurological mechanisms that promote attentional control, which gives problem-related information prioritized access to limited processing resources and makes depressive rumination intrusive, persistent, resistant to distraction, and difficult to suppress; (2) induces anhedonia, which reduces the desire to think about and engage in hedonic activities that could disrupt problem-related processing; and (3) promotes psychomotor changes that reduce exposure to stimuli that could disrupt processing (e.g., desire for social isolation, loss of appetite).
Over evolutionary time, depressive rumination often helped people solve the problems that triggered their episodes [...] Like fever, then, the impairments associated with depression are usually the outcome of adaptive tradeoffs rather than disorder. For instance, because processing resources are limited, a decreased ability to concentrate on other things is a necessary tradeoff that has to be made in order to sustain analysis of a complex, depressogenic problem
The fourth claim is that depression reduces accuracy on laboratory tasks because depressive rumination takes up limited processing resources [...]In summary, studies of clinical, subclinical, and experimentally induced depression all show that when given a laboratory task, depressed people ruminate about other things, which takes up limited cognitive resources and interferes with their ability to perform well on the task. It is therefore illegitimate to conclude that depression generally impairs problem-solving from studies showing reduced performance on laboratory tasks. They have nothing to say about how successful depressed people are in solving the problems that they are ruminating about.
In summary, we hypothesize that depression is a stress response mechanism: (1) that is triggered by analytically difficult problems that influence important fitness-related goals; (2) that coordinates changes in body systems to promote sustained analysis of the triggering problem, otherwise known as depressive rumination; (3) that helps people generate and evaluate potential solutions to the triggering problem; and (4) that makes tradeoffs with other goals in order to promote analysis of the triggering problem, including reduced accuracy on laboratory tasks. Collectively, we refer to this suite of claims as the analytical rumination (AR) hypothesis.
The sense that I’ve gotten (from my own experience, from anecdotes about startup founders, and from some of Anna’s examples) is that there’s not much distinction between “falling” and “trough,” or between “rising” and “peak.” We’re looking at a phenomenon of RAPID, LARGE swings, such that you’re basically at one place one day, and in a completely different one the next (not that the shifts happen daily—just that they’re abrupt).
In other words, the way we chose to describe it might make it seem like there’s a larger distinction, there, but I think what you’re labeling “peaks” and “troughs” are actually the same places we were trying to talk about.
Melancholia, mania and severe depression might be a bit different, but with normal episodes I think the upswing is when you are solving problems without issues. The turning point at the top is when you come across a complex problem which matters to you and that you are unable to solve. The downswing and slide into depression is your body’s way of moving into a kind of analytical mode. Like fever is induced to fight infection, depression is induced to fight despair. I think that despair is separate to the depression. It is the perceived lack of control over negative events, we often call it hopelessness. Depression, on the other hand, is the induced state of mind.
The reason why such mood swings as you describe might happen with startup founders, for example, is that they face complex problems that they care deeply about and that have high social costs if they fail at them. The idea I am presenting here gets to be quite complicated in practice because the cause of the depression is the perceived complexity of the problem, perceived ability to solve it and perceived social costs with failing. These all depend on the perceiver and we don’t see the world as it is, we see they world as we are. It is possible that someone might slide into depression because of misttributed emotions, wrong beliefs etc.
Depression might also be too strong a word. Perhaps, ‘sad’ is better. I don’t know. I am referring to ‘depression’ as the down ward sections in your mood swings figure.
I am basing what I wrote above on my understanding of this paper which posits that depression is an evolved stress response mechanism. This claim makes sense if you believe the broaden and build theory. The paper makes the following claims
Complex Problems Trigger Depressed Affect. The analytical rumination (AR) hypothesis proposes that depressed affect is triggered by problems: (1) that are complex (analytically difficult); and (2) that affected fitness in evolutionary environments. [...] One effect of sad or depressed mood is to promote an analytical reasoning style in which greater attention is paid to detail and information is processed more slowly, methodically, thoroughly, and in smaller chunks [...] Complex social problems may be the primary evolutionarily relevant trigger of depression in human beings
Depression coordinates a suite of changes in body systems that promote rumination, the evolved function of which is to analyze the triggering problem. [...]Analysis is time consuming and requires sustained processing, so it is susceptible to disruption, which interferes with problem-solving. Depression induces changes in body systems, producing effects that facilitate analytical rumination by reducing disruption [...]Specifically, depressed affect: (1) activates neurological mechanisms that promote attentional control, which gives problem-related information prioritized access to limited processing resources and makes depressive rumination intrusive, persistent, resistant to distraction, and difficult to suppress; (2) induces anhedonia, which reduces the desire to think about and engage in hedonic activities that could disrupt problem-related processing; and (3) promotes psychomotor changes that reduce exposure to stimuli that could disrupt processing (e.g., desire for social isolation, loss of appetite).
Over evolutionary time, depressive rumination often helped people solve the problems that triggered their episodes [...] Like fever, then, the impairments associated with depression are usually the outcome of adaptive tradeoffs rather than disorder. For instance, because processing resources are limited, a decreased ability to concentrate on other things is a necessary tradeoff that has to be made in order to sustain analysis of a complex, depressogenic problem The fourth claim is that depression reduces accuracy on laboratory tasks because depressive rumination takes up limited processing resources [...]In summary, studies of clinical, subclinical, and experimentally induced depression all show that when given a laboratory task, depressed people ruminate about other things, which takes up limited cognitive resources and interferes with their ability to perform well on the task. It is therefore illegitimate to conclude that depression generally impairs problem-solving from studies showing reduced performance on laboratory tasks. They have nothing to say about how successful depressed people are in solving the problems that they are ruminating about.