The Value of Depression
By Al Galves

Al Galves is a retired psychologist who lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He is the author of Lighten Up. Dance With Your Dark Side. You can find him on his website: www.algalves.com

Al Galves

The biggest problem with the conventional wisdom about mental illness is that it encourages people to ignore the meaning of the symptoms that are used to diagnose them. That is a problem because it deprives people of vital information that can help them live more the way they want to live.

The conventional wisdom about mental illness is that it is caused by genetic factors, chemical imbalances and brain abnormalities. If you believe that, you have no interest in exploring the meaning of the symptoms or listening to what they may have to tell you. Rather, you are encouraged to get rid of the symptoms as quickly as possible and pay no further attention to them.

But what if those symptoms had important information for people, information they need in order to lead healthy, fulfilling lives?

If you believe in evolution and natural selection you would conclude that the symptoms must have some survival value, must be useful in some ways. Were they not useful, they would have been wiped away by natural selection a long time ago. After all, human beings have been evolving for about 30 million years, the estimated time since humans split off from the other members of the primate family. Any human faculty which has lasted for 30 million years must be useful to our survival and well-being in some way.

If that is true, let’s look at some of the symptoms of mental illness and see how they might be useful to us.

Here are the symptoms that are used to diagnose the most common mental illness – depression. (Yes folks, the symptoms that are listed below, and nothing else, are used by doctors and psychiatrists to diagnose clinical depression). You would think – considering the conventional wisdom about mental illness – that there was a more “medical” way of diagnosing depression, a blood test or brain scan. But no, the way it is diagnosed is the doctor, psychiatrist or other mental health professional asks the patient to give a self report on the following questions:

More: http://www.power2u.org/articles/self...epression.html