Why Do Depressed People Often Have Inaccurate Beliefs?

Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Depression From an Evolutionary Perspective. Steven D. Hollon, Paul W. Andrews and J. Anderson Thomson Jr. Front. Psychiatry, July 5 2021. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.667592

Abstract: Evolutionary medicine attempts to solve a problem with which traditional medicine has struggled historically; how do we distinguish between diseased states and “healthy” responses to disease states? Fever and diarrhea represent classic examples of evolved adaptations that increase the likelihood of survival in response to the presence of pathogens in the body. Whereas, the severe mental disorders like psychotic mania or the schizophrenias may involve true “disease” states best treated pharmacologically, most non-psychotic “disorders” that revolve around negative affects like depression or anxiety are likely adaptations that evolved to serve a function that increased inclusive fitness in our ancestral past. What this likely means is that the proximal mechanisms underlying the non-psychotic “disorders” are “species typical” and neither diseases nor disorders. Rather, they are coordinated “whole body” responses that prepare the individual to respond in a maximally functional fashion to the variety of different challenges that our ancestors faced. A case can be made that depression evolved to facilitate a deliberate cognitive style (rumination) in response to complex (often social) problems. What this further suggests is that those interventions that best facilitate the functions that those adaptations evolved to serve (such as rumination) are likely to be preferred over those like medications that simply anesthetize the distress. We consider the mechanisms that evolved to generate depression and the processes utilized in cognitive behavior therapy to facilitate those functions from an adaptationist evolutionary perspective.

Question 9: Why Do Depressed People Often Have Inaccurate Beliefs?

The ARH posits that depression is an adaptation that evolved to facilitate solving complex (often social) problems by virtue of motivating a switch from quick heuristic-driven Type 1 thinking into a more energy-expensive but carefully deliberative Type 2 thinking (rumination) (16). Cognitive theory suggests that depression is in large part a consequence of inaccurate beliefs and maladaptive information processing and that rumination is, at best, a symptom of depression and at worst a maintaining cause. If depression evolved because it motivates efforts to solve complex (often social) problems and rumination (careful deliberation) is the means by which it achieves that goal, how is it that the beliefs that people hold when depressed seem to be incorrect (at least to their therapist). We think that there are several possible resolutions to this conundrum.

Intraspecific Competition Occurs in All Species

First, maladaptive mistakes and failures are an integral part of the human condition. Within every species, individuals compete for scarce resources that are important for survival and reproduction (e.g., food, territories, mates). As a result of that competition, it is inevitable that there are winners and losers. Human beings compete for these resources through situationally dependent cognition and behavior (95). For humans, the social world is incredibly complex and constantly in flux, such that the best strategy often changes from one situation to another. As a result, humans have evolved the cognitive capacity to develop mental models of human nature in order to predict how best to behave and what to expect from others in response. Due to differences in genes and experience, some people will develop mental models that work relatively well, while others will develop mental models that work more poorly. In other words, we do not need to invoke the concept of a mental disorder to understand why people develop inaccurate beliefs about their social world. It is simply a necessary consequence of the fact that humans compete to develop better mental models of human nature, and some people are less successful than others in this competition.

But this perspective also suggests that natural selection might have favored the evolution of psychological mechanisms that adjust mental models when they fail to function properly. Mental models are not necessarily “maladaptive” just because they are inaccurate; they are maladaptive if they lead to losses or failures to achieve the resources that make reproduction possible (e.g., mates, food, status, social support). Thus, we argue that the reason why depression is often associated with failures and losses in important domains (e.g., romantic relationships) is because these events suggest that one's mental models of the social world are not working well and need to be revised through the employment of careful methodical Type 2 thinking.

Evolutionary Mismatch

Second, it is possible that what is going on reflects nothing more than evolutionary mismatch. Evolved adaptations are traits that exist now because they were shaped by selective pressures that operated in the past (96). Modern environments may deviate substantially from ancestral ones. If so, then what was adaptive in the past may not be adaptive in the present. Most people crave foods that taste sweet. That was adaptive in our evolutionary past when the primary source of simple carbohydrates were fruits that were also rich in vitamins but serves us less well with the advent of processed sugars that lead to obesity and tooth decay. Similarly, starvation was a recurring risk in our ancestral past leading to a preference for the kinds of high caloric foods that raise the risk for metabolic syndrome for those members of the species who have access to an ample supply of meats and starches. From an evolutionary perspective, people have evolved to pay undue attention to how they are treated by close relatives (those who share your genes) and especially by their parents. If your parents do not love or invest in you, that does not bode well for your future. Most recurrence-prone patients have stable (albeit latent) self-images at the core of their depressotypic schemas that they are flawed in some fashion (usually unlovable or incompetent) that predate adolescence. In many instances these beliefs stemmed from the belief (accurate or otherwise) that their parents did not value them and in our ancestral past that could prove to be highly problematic. It likely still is true that being valued by one's parents helps one survive one's childhood, but it is less likely that retaining those negative beliefs about oneself into adolescence helps one navigate complex social relationships as adults. Moreover, the “nuclear family” is a rather modern invention. Children raised in hunter-gatherer societies were usually surrounded by “allo (other) mothers” who contribute the care and nurturing of the child. “Parental investment” in our ancestral past was more a matter of “tribal investment” than it is today.

Adaptive Search Strategies Are Imperfect

Natural selection causes a species to incrementally increase its fitness, but it does so without foresight or purpose, and it does not guarantee perfection. As Tooby and Cosmides opined “there is no such thing as an adaptation that can maximize fitness under all possible circumstances” (96). The human eye is a good example. It is one of 40 different kinds of “eyes” that evolved in the animal kingdom to process electromagnetic radiation and it functions to let organisms “see” objects at a distance. The human eye contains a “blind spot” at the back of the retina where the optic nerve exits on its way to the brain. No “intelligent designer” would have “designed” an eye that functioned in that fashion (there is nothing adaptive about having a “blind spot” in the back of one's eye and not all species have one) but natural selection does not double back on itself. If a feature represents an improvement over what came before then it tends to be selected regardless of whether some other solution might have worked better. Search-based optimization techniques are useful and often find a superior solution but that does not guarantee that the optimal solution will be found.

The ARH suggests only that people who are depressed will use a slow deliberate “Type 2” processing style to search for a solution to their problems, not that they will always succeed when they do so. It is quite possible that some will get “stuck” for a period of time at a suboptimal solution. Based on clinical (and personal) experience we suspect that it can be quite useful to carefully examine one's own role when things go wrong since that is the easiest thing to correct in the future, but ascribing blame in the form of a stable trait (unlovable or incompetent) is more likely to keep one “stuck” than focusing on the behaviors that one did (or did not) engage in. Traits are simply harder to correct than actions (20). Clinical experience also suggests that those trait ascriptions are more “conditional” than stable and thus still amenable to change. As previously described, much of what gets done in CBT is focused around getting patients to consider alternative explanations for their problems and to examine the existing evidence for each and to run behavioral experiments to test between those competing beliefs. For example, in the case of the sculptor, it was breaking big tasks down into their component parts and doing them one at a time (graded task assignment) that helped him past his tendency to get so overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task that he did not get started. In effect, gathering evidence and running behavioral experiments allows one to correct misguided assumptions and beliefs (it was not that he was “incompetent” just that he chose the wrong behavioral strategy), and thus correct the residue of unfortunate prior experiences (his belief in his own “incompetence” came from being forced to compete with a younger brother for his father's attention and frequently losing out to a sibling who was more outgoing and more facile). What he learned as a young adolescent was not out-of-line with the competition that he faced and the “failures” he experienced; it just was not all that relevant to the challenges he faced as an adult. That said, depression is needed to motivate one to search for the solution to a problem and without that search there is no solution (21).

Normal Anxiety Can Disrupt Rumination

Getting “unstuck” from a suboptimal solution may involve doing something different than what one has done in the past and for many people that can involve the perception of risk and its attendant affect anxiety. Anxiety often co-occurs with depression [two-thirds of the patients who met criteria for MDD in the DeRubeis and colleagues in the 2005 Penn-Vandy study also met criteria for one or more anxiety “disorder” (69)] but its effect on cognition is different (42).

Whereas, depression leads the individual to ask, “where did I go wrong” and to carefully weigh paths forward, anxiety tends to promote a “better-safe-than-sorry” approach that is often an adaptive response to an imminently dangerous situation (24, 42). Expressing a romantic interest in someone opens one to the risk of rejection and pursing a goal in an achievement domain leaves one at risk for failure, but neither takes one out of the gene pool. Choosing not to act on either does nothing to further the propagation of one's genes.

Earlier we described a teacher who thought that a prior sexual assault as an adolescent undercut her value as a prospective mate and relied on dissimulations and manipulations as compensatory strategies (lying about her past and manipulating romantic partners to get what she wanted) to generate a series of troubled and transitory relationships when in fact it was these interpersonal “safety behaviors” that sabotaged the relationships she formed (20). It was not until she took the chance of leveling with a new romantic partner about what had happened to her in the past (something that took great courage on her part) that she learned that he was not the least concerned about what that meant about her (other than he was sorry that she had been assaulted) and that she could drop the safety behaviors (the lies and manipulations) and simply ask for what she wanted from him in the relationship. Fifteen years she had been stuck on a suboptimal peak because of the anxiety that the thought of full disclosure caused her. The process of climbing down off that suboptimal peak was fraught with a sense of dread that took several months in therapy (and a conversation with a girlfriend and an anonymous survey of “eligible” males) to overcome but the outcome was quite gratifying to her, and she got better (and more comfortable) engaging in self-revelation (as needed) across a series of increasingly satisfying relationships.

Large Fitness Consequences Can Favor Seemingly Unproductive Cognitions

There is nothing so universally depressogenic as the loss of a child. It is not uncommon for parents who have lost a child to ruminate intensely over what they might have done to prevent the child's death even when it seems clear to others (including the therapist) that there was nothing else they could have done. That being said, understanding the causes of a negative event (even one that has already occurred) can be useful in preventing similar negative events in the future (16, 97).

In our ancestral past, women had an average of about six children over their lifetimes of whom several died (98). Effort spent on understanding the causes of one child's death might help prevent the death of another (99, 100). Watching parents engage in self-recriminating rumination might seem cruel, but the fitness costs are so great that natural selection would have favored the expenditure of a great deal of cognitive effort even if it only had a miniscule chance of increasing the odds of survival for the other children. We focused on the loss of a child in this example, but the same principle extends to any situation in which the fitness consequences are great.

As Dawkins describes in his 1976 treatise “The Selfish Gene,” we are but “survival machines” engineered by natural selection to propagate our gene lines at all times even if at our own affective expense (101). An evolutionary perspective would suggest that there is little point in trying to convince grieving parents not to engage in a causal analysis in such a situation (or other patients from grieving in the aftermath of a romantic breakup or the loss of a job) but rather to point out that the brain is designed to explore the possible causes of negative life events on the off chance that such events can be prevented in the future. To ruminate in response to loss or failure is an eminently “species-typical” (human) thing to do. The optimal response in CBT is to label it as an attempt to solve a problem (or prevent a future one) and to help the process along.

Inclusive Fitness Theory

As previously noted, one of the most important insights in evolutionary biology over the last century is that organisms are not designed by natural selection to maximize their own survival or even their own reproductive success but rather to maximize the reproductive success of their gene line (102). This is what Dawkins meant when he labeled us as nothing more than “survival machines” (101). Individuals not only propagate their gene lines through their own reproductive efforts (direct fitness) but also via propagating the reproductive success of their biological relatives (indirect fitness). The sum of direct and indirect fitness is called inclusive fitness (103), and it is this sum that best predicts of what kinds of behaviors organisms engage in because that is what is actually maximized by natural selection (102).

The essence of the idea was captured by the iconic quip by the evolutionary geneticist J. B. S. Haldane who was reported to have said that he would not sacrifice his life for his brother, but he would do so for two brothers or eight cousins (104). This phenomenon is easiest to see in the lives of social insects. Only a small percentage of the individuals actually reproduce (the queen and one or more of the male drones) while the vast majority labor to ensure the propagation of a gene line comprised solely of their biological siblings. This concept is crucial in explaining many important biological events including multicellularity, apoptosis and other forms of programmed cell death, as well as the evolution of social systems characterized by family groups and parenting behavior in humans. Where it intersects especially with clinical concerns has to do with self-sacrifice. No one would question a parent's willingness to sacrifice his or her life for the life of his or her child, but not all would see the same genetic mechanism “baked in” to the suicidal ruminations of a person who is concerned about being a burden to biological relatives.

In not-so-distant times amongst peoples who lived on the edge starvation in northern climes (like the Inuit north of the Arctic circle), it would be considered “de rigueur” for post-reproductive elders to walk out into the snow and not come back if the winters were too long and their grandchildren faced starvation as a consequence (105). Such “altruistic” notions might seem misguided in situations in which starvation is not imminent (suicide is the “gift that keeps on giving” to the survivors) but the psychological mechanism would have been selected for in our ancestral past in a manner wholly in keeping with the concept of inclusive fitness.

Many people who die by suicide believe that their families would be better off without them (106). Most patients entertain at least “passive” suicidal ideation, and over half of all people who die by suicide have a history of depression. Self-sacrificial impulses would be favored by natural selection among those individuals who see themselves as defective or impaired and those with a history of childhood abuse (self-esteem is often based on parent's behavior). People with a history of failed relationships also are at risk even during the reproductive years (107–109).

If some of our readers have a visceral response to the use of the word “adaptive” to describe suicide and other forms of self-destructive behavior, this is an indication that the evolutionary perspective is novel and non-intuitive. Clinicians need to understand the naturalistic fallacy. An ‘is' is not an ‘ought.' Cancer ‘is' a collection of cells that are pursuing their inclusive fitness. It is hardly an “ought,” but intervention ‘is' nevertheless warranted. Moreover, we should not let moral repugnance bias the scientific study of human behavior. Prolicide (killing one's offspring), the killing of conspecifics, and sexual coercion are common throughout the animal kingdom, and humans are no different. We strongly advocate for clinical intervention in situations in which people are engaging in self-destructive behavior as part of the pursuit of indirect fitness interests. We also think that it is likely to help the patient to identify the evolutionary origins of seemingly maladaptive behaviors, such as rumination and suicide. Not all evolved adaptations need to be implemented if they are not consistent with the patient's current interests (most reproductively capable adults practice birth control from time-to-time). Making treatment more efficacious will require differentiating psychological phenomena that result from some malfunction in the brain from those mechanisms that evolved to maximize inclusive fitness. Any effective and efficient treatment must fit an accurate model of human nature and depression.