Depression was useful?
2022. I was depressed. There’s five months where I couldn’t tell you what I did.
I remember wondering during that time, “Why am I so depressed? Why are my emotions so irrational? Why is my brain so dumb?”
At the same time, my social interactions were not going as I wanted:
I was having trouble making close friends.
I would like a woman and then never hear from her again. This happened a few times.
Whenever I expressed any kind of disapproval, those around me seemed to get mad at me.
And I didn’t realize it consciously, but interacting with others felt emotionally unsafe.
Separately, something about me is that when I’m depressed and low energy, I don’t want to interact with other people.
So, if interacting with other people was unsafe, then one way for me to be safe was to be depressed.
Maybe I didn’t have a ‘dumb brain’ after all…
What if my depression wasn’t a problem? What if it was actually a solution to a different problem?
In which case, my problem wasn’t “being depressed” as I had thought. Instead, it was not knowing how to interact with other people in a way that felt emotionally safe.
I was working with a great counselor at the time, and once we found this, we worked on making social interactions safe. Within a few weeks/sessions my fears were handled and I didn’t need to be depressed anymore.
Also, while I was depressed I had moved to the middle of nowhere — conveniently far from almost anyone I might have wanted to talk to. But within three weeks of this shift I moved to a big city and had ten times as much social interaction. I have not needed to be depressed again in more than 1.5 years since.
Seeing my depression as potentially part of a helpful strategy in the present helped me grow.
Generalizing this idea as a principle:
Mental issues are usually locally optimal in some way. For example, depression, anxiety, insecurity, failure at work, failure in romance, muscle tension / chronic pain, self-loathing, etc. commonly help one avoid fears or achieve unconscious goals.
