The Depths Quotes

“Rather than assuming weakness or defectiveness, we should acknowledge that getting through depression requires considerable strength. Rather than assuming permanent debility, we should recognize that some depressions are followed by thriving.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“One reason we're not winning the fight against depression is that our available treatments leave so many in partial recovery limbo.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“When I noticed other people, I wondered what it was like to be alive. They did not know, could not know, how I felt inside. My shell still passed for normal. I felt like I should scream for help, someone should help, but I knew that the time for screaming had passed. Best to just keep on walking, walking dead, one of the few things I could still do. So I kept walking.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“You know what you have to do, you just can't do it", Sara says wearily. "It's like you have bricks on your feet.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“Theories without data are like daydreams.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“Though I learned little in my compromised state, I learned enough to make a decision: I was going to understand how mood could overwhelm. I was going to understand depression or die trying.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“My training makes me uneasy with a happy mystery.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“Depressed people don't end up lying in bed because they are undercommitted to goals. They end up lying in bed because they are overcommitted to goals that are failing.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“Analysis of thousands of survey responses found that when people in different countries were asked to rate how desirable and appropriate it is to experience varying psychological states, positive states like joy and affection were rated more desirable and appropriate in Australia and the United States than in Taiwan and China. Cross-cultural research by Jeanne Tsai of Stanford University has also found that European Americans place the highest value on specific forms of happiness, idealizing states like enthusiasm or excitement, termed high arousal positive states. By contrast, Chinese and other Asian test subjects place the highest value on other forms of happiness, idealizing states such as calm and serenity, termed low arousal positive states. Mauss and colleagues found that some people put an especially high value on happiness, endorsing items like, “If I don’t feel happy, maybe there is something wrong with me”; and “To have a meaningful life, I need to feel happy most of the time.” Surprisingly, women who said that they valued happiness more were actually less happy than women who valued it less.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“More people in the West—especially the young—are setting the kinds of goals that are likely to become failing goals in the future. From 1976 to 2006, the percentage of high school students who said that having a lot of money was “extremely” important rose from 16 to over 25 percent. Additional evidence for the overcommitment theory is that perfectionists are more likely to become depressed than nonperfectionists. Perfectionism involves a tendency to maintain high self-expectations about goal completion.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“One idea that has been repeatedly tested is that low mood can make people better at analyzing their environments. Classic experiments by psychologists Lyn Abramson and Lauren Alloy focused specifically on the accuracy of people’s perceptions of their control of events, using test situations that systematically varied in how much control the subject truly had. In different conditions, subjects’ responses (pressing or not pressing a button) controlled an environmental outcome (turning on a green light) to varying degrees. Interestingly, subjects who were dysphoric (in a negative mood and exhibiting other symptoms of depression) were superior at this task to subjects who were nondysphoric (in a normal mood). Subjects who were in a normal mood were more likely to overestimate or underestimate how much control they had over the light coming on.7 Dubbed depressive realism, Alloy and Abramson’s work has inspired other, often quite sophisticated, experimental demonstrations of ways that low mood can lead to better, clearer thinking.8 In 2007 studies by Australian psychologist Joseph Forgas found that a brief mood induction changed how well people were able to argue. Compared to subjects in a positive mood, subjects who were put in a negative mood (by watching a ten-minute film about death from cancer) produced more effective persuasive messages on a standardized topic such as raising student fees or aboriginal land rights. Follow-up analyses found that the key reason the sadder people were more persuasive was that their arguments were richer in concrete detail (see Figure 2.2).9 In other experiments, Forgas and his colleagues have demonstrated diverse benefits of a sad mood. It can improve memory performance, reduce errors in judgment, make people slightly better at detecting deception in others, and foster more effective interpersonal strategies, such as increasing the politeness of requests. What seems to tie together these disparate effects is that a sad mood, at least of the garden variety, makes people more deliberate, skeptical, and careful in how they process information from their environment.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“When anxious subjects are shown happy, neutral and angry faces on a computer screen, their attention is drawn to the angry faces signaling a potential threat Conversely, good moods broaden attention and make people inclined to seek out information and novelty. In one study, participants in good moods sought more variety when choosing among packaged foods, such as crackers, soup, and snacks. Moods have the power to influence behavior because they have such wide purchase on the body and mind. They affect what we notice, our levels of alertness and energy, and what goals we choose.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“I am willing to be vulnerable and embrace the natural flow of life rather than trying to direct it to my own course and yet it has given me new courage because there is no consequence that could come as close as wanting to die… The ver worst thing that can happen in a life is wanting to end it. So I live more bravely than ever with more respect for others and myself.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“Just as a stressful life can make you depressed, continuing exposure to stressors maintains depression.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“As she lay awake, she reminded herself that she was beating the depression; she was winning her life back. She had survived, and now she was going to be better than ever before.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“To the extent that my depression offered a warning, I think it was about the hazard of putting all one’s eggs in a single basket.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“One technical term for these cognitive effects of mood is mood-congruent memory, or the increased ability to think of content that matches our current mood state. In experiments, happy subjects retrieve memories of pleasant personal experiences more readily than those of unpleasant experiences, whereas sad subjects retrieve sad memories more readily than happy ones. The utility of mood congruency is that a mood will automatically cue up thoughts and memories that are most relevant to the present situation. In the case of a sad mood, we automatically bring thoughts and memories about losses to mind.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“BOOKS ABOUT DEPRESSION TYPICALLY DO NOT INCLUDE A CHAPTER about when people are nearly better—what comes between the worst passing and the achievement of wellness. However, those who experience residual depression know firsthand that it can be depression’s most awkward—as well as its most precarious—phase. It is a state of limbo many times over, one that may determine the course of recovery. I remember my wife Laura asking me, “Do you want me to treat you like a sick person or a well person?” I paused because I didn’t know. Spouses, bosses, and friends who were sympathetic throughout disclosure and treatment may lose patience with making allowances. So, too, the sufferer may be done with depression, well before depression is done with him.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“Consistent with the idea that combinations of problems may be less manageable than individual problems, one study found that having three stressful life events was actually four times as bad for future depression as having two stressful life events. With each new problem, the mood system must face a longer and more complex equation with more unknown terms.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“One is elevated cortisol, already mentioned as a stress hormone important in bodily mobilization for use in short-term emergencies, such as a zebra needing to escape from a lion. Normally, cortisol is tightly regulated to help it return to low levels, but this hormone is persistently elevated in many depressed people. Longer exposure to high cortisol has a welter of physical effects, like wasting muscles and even damaged neurons in the brain. Prolonged cortisol exposure may also help stretch out depression. Consistent with this notion, patients with Cushing’s syndrome, a metabolic disorder caused by high levels of cortisol, often become depressed.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“In a separate test we found that depressed individuals who disclosed the least sad emotion when discussing memories of sad life events also showed the least improvement in their symptoms one year later.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“Decades of research on the stress hormone cortisol indicate that many depressed people chronically overproduce this hormone. More revealing, the chemical switches that normally turn cortisol off appear to be stuck.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“We live in a culture that values doing. As members of this culture we are predisposed to view conditions in which people cannot do as diseases. The Minnesota Starvation Experiment simulated famine and extreme food scarcity, situations that repeatedly killed our mammalian forebears and even now threaten many millions of people. Animals that reacted to famine with high mood and bold new ventures were less likely to make it through than those that responded with low mood and behavioral withdrawal”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“Some research shows that people who report an ability to accept negative feelings when they arise are less likely to experience depressive symptoms in the future.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“The idea that depression is about holding onto failing goals also fits clinically with the kinds of situations that often precipitate serious depression: the battered wife who cannot bring herself to leave her troubled marriage, the seriously injured athlete who cannot bring himself to retire, the laid-off employee who cannot bring herself to abandon her chosen career despite a lack of positions in the field. What may be most important for exposing humans to the risk of depression is that they are able to pursue highly abstract goals and to set goals in domains where progress is difficult to measure.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“Medication, meditation, sleeping pills, trying to spend time doing ‘things that bring me joy’ (which just backfires, because I end up feeling hopeless while I’m doing them).” Every day that the depression goes on, failures to change mood turn into nagging thoughts: “Why can’t I just get over this? “Why am I so weak?” These self-monitoring statements become further fodder for rumination, which becomes further fodder for depression, and we are reminded once again that our powers of language are a decidedly mixed blessing. As you can see, our interpretations of sad mood are powered by a meaning-making machine that is not easy to downshift. This explains why the most useless pieces of well-meaning advice to give someone in midst of a deep depression are “Snap out of it” or “Stop thinking about it.” This advice is nearly impossible to implement; about as futile as asking a burn victim to stop feeling pain.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“People who report a greater tendency to ruminate on a short questionnaire have longer periods of depressed mood in everyday life, are more pessimistic about the future, and have a harder time recovering from the effects of stressors such as a natural disaster or a recent bereavement. Depressed people, however, recast their movies with themselves as villains and play them in an endless loop. A depressed chimp, lacking a deep autobiographical self, is spared this screening and will never have the experience of lying awake at night thinking, “I am a terrible mother.” Our capacity to dwell on our own failings makes us more vulnerable to depression than our fellow mammals.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“Finally, as depression recedes, the person is not clinically well but remains mired, unable to shake off all vestiges of low mood.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“The most important and well-studied depression-prone personality trait is neuroticism. People who score high on neuroticism are prone to anxiety and other negative feelings (think Woody Allen) and have stronger upsets in response to stresses, be it sudden job loss or terrorist attack. There is robust evidence that neurotic temperaments predispose people to experience periods of low mood and periods of more severe, long-lasting depression. A wealth of data indicates that highly neurotic people are like the fabled ant: they worry about bad things that may or may not happen in the future, and they are more vigilant about threats, even those that are distant, hidden, or subtle.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“When the bad things happen also matters. Extensive research demonstrates that early life traumas, such as physical or sexual abuse, lay the groundwork for a slow creep of depression and anxiety. Temperamental differences, revealed so early in life, are likely to be substantially controlled by genes.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic