简单心理协同翻译（三）Depression’s Upside 抑郁症的好处
感谢各位译者。他们是：
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@你才是懒猫 会被嫌弃么
@小黏糕 pharmacology学生一枚～
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@舞兰 啊咧 颜色要被用完了~ have fun啦~
@Anonymous 这么少女粉红色用不惯啊啊 （可以换颜色哈！）
@Mr李先生在 橙子的颜色 多补充vc
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@Peter Han 第一次来。
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@大熊吃哈密瓜 差点把颜色都毁了，have fun-0-
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@猩猩君 第一次翻译，请轻拍！
@蒲公英与葵 典型的科技白痴
@pb2002 翻不好我可能会抑郁
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原文链接 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/magazine/28depression-t.html
Depression’s Upside
By JONAH LEHRER
February 28, 2010
抑郁的好处
作者 Jonah Lehrer
2010年2月28日
The Victorians had many names for depression, and Charles Darwin used them all. There were his “fits” brought on by “excitements,” “flurries” leading to an “uncomfortable palpitation of the heart” and “air fatigues” that triggered his “head symptoms.” In one particularly pitiful letter, written to a specialist in “psychological medicine,” he confessed to “extreme spasmodic daily and nightly flatulence” and “hysterical crying” whenever Emma, his devoted wife, left him alone.
维多利亚时代人们对抑郁症有很多称谓，查尔斯达尔文（译者注：就是提出进化论那位）把这些词用了一个遍。有因为“兴奋”所以“歇斯底里”；“百爪挠心”导致“心悸不适”；还有“疲惫不堪的感觉”引发”头部不适“。在一封特别悲情的信里面，他向一个“医学心理”领域的专家承认：每当他的挚爱妻子Emma把他独自撇下的时候，他就“没日没夜极端痉挛的胀气”和“歇斯底里的哭泣”。
While there has been endless speculation about Darwin’s mysterious ailment — his symptoms have been attributed to everything from lactose intolerance to Chagas disease — Darwin himself was most troubled by his recurring mental problems. His depression left him “not able to do anything one day out of three,” choking on his “bitter mortification.” He despaired of the weakness of mind that ran in his family. “The ‘race is for the strong,’ ” Darwin wrote. “I shall probably do little more but be content to admire the strides others made in Science.”
对于达尔文的迷一样的疾病，有无穷无尽的猜测 --- 他的病征被归罪于各种疾病，从乳糖不耐受到 Chagas [南美锥虫]病 --- 达尔文自己最纠结的则是他的反复出现的心理问题。他的抑郁让他“三天中有一天啥也干不了，” 被自己“苦恼的尴尬”憋死。他对家族中的头脑之脆弱绝望。“这是强者的比赛，”达尔文写道，“我大概做不了啥了，只能满足于赞叹其他人对科学的贡献."
Darwin, of course, was wrong; his recurring fits didn’t prevent him from succeeding in science. Instead, the pain may actually have accelerated the pace of his research, allowing him to withdraw from the world and concentrate entirely on his work. His letters are filled with references to the salvation of study, which allowed him to temporarily escape his gloomy moods. “Work is the only thing which makes life endurable to me,” Darwin wrote and later remarked that it was his “sole enjoyment in life.”
当然达尔文错了。他的喜怒无常并不能阻止他在科学上的迈向成功的脚步。反倒是这种痛苦加快了他研究的步伐，让他从现实世界中抽身出来，全心全意的投入他的工作。他在信中讨论的全是研究给予他的救赎，这样他可以暂时的逃离开他的阴郁情绪。“工作是唯一能让我觉得生活尚可忍受的事情”，达尔文曾经这么写道，而后又强调“这是生活中唯一的乐趣”。
For Darwin, depression was a clarifying force, focusing the mind on its most essential problems. In his autobiography, he speculated on the purpose of such misery; his evolutionary theory was shadowed by his own life story. “Pain or suffering of any kind,” he wrote, “if long continued, causes depression and lessens the power of action, yet it is well adapted to make a creature guard itself against any great or sudden evil.” And so sorrow was explained away, because pleasure was not enough. Sometimes, Darwin wrote, it is the sadness that informs as it “leads an animal to pursue that course of action which is most beneficial.” The darkness was a kind of light.
对达尔文来说，抑郁是一个澄清视角的力量，使他专注于最重要的事情。在他的自传中，他对这种悲惨境遇的目的做了推测；他的进化论被他自己的生活蒙上了阴影。“任何形式的苦痛或者折磨，”他写到，“如果长期持续，会引起抑郁且减少行动力，但能使生物在应对任何巨大或者突然的恶果时候很好的适应保护自己。” 这样一来悲伤（的原因）就好理解了，因为愉悦不够多。达尔文写到，有时候，正是悲伤就像动物趋利避害的本能一样引导着我们做出最有利的行动。 黑暗是另一种光明。
The mystery of depression is not that it exists — the mind, like the flesh, is prone to malfunction. Instead, the paradox of depression has long been its prevalence. While most mental illnesses are extremely rare — schizophrenia, for example, is seen in less than 1 percent of the population — depression is everywhere, as inescapable as the common cold. Every year, approximately 7 percent of us will be afflicted to some degree by the awful mental state that William Styron described as a “gray drizzle of horror . . . a storm of murk.” Obsessed with our pain, we will retreat from everything. We will stop eating, unless we start eating too much. Sex will lose its appeal; sleep will become a frustrating pursuit. We will always be tired, even though we will do less and less. We will think a lot about death.
抑郁的谜团并非它的存在---思维如肉体一般，很容易出现故障。相反，抑郁症的悖论盛行已久。相较而言其他精神疾病的十分罕见---比如精神分裂症，约有小于总人口的1%的人患病---抑郁症则随处可见，就像无法摆脱的普通感冒一样。每年我们当中约有百分之七的人将会在某种程度上被William Styrone描述为“淅淅沥的灰色的恐怖之雨… 一场黑暗的暴风雨”的痛苦精神状况所折磨。深陷痛苦之中，我们逃避一切。我们要么不吃，要么暴饮暴食。我们对性失去兴趣；难以入眠。即便做的事情越来越少，我们仍旧总是感到疲倦。我们将会对死亡思考颇多。
The persistence of this affliction — and the fact that it seemed to be heritable — posed a serious challenge to Darwin’s new evolutionary theory. If depression was a disorder, then evolution had made a tragic mistake, allowing an illness that impedes reproduction — it leads people to stop having sex and consider suicide — to spread throughout the population. For some unknown reason, the modern human mind is tilted toward sadness and, as we’ve now come to think, needs drugs to rescue itself.
这一疾病的持续性以及可遗传性为达尔文的新进化论带来了严峻的挑战。如果抑郁是一种失调，则代表在进化时出现了一个灾难性的失误——即这种疾病阻碍了繁殖，使人们不再有性行为，也是一种形式上的自我灭亡。这一自杀性现象会遍及整个人口。在现代，由于某些未知的原因，这种思维现象被冠以悲伤之名，以至于我们现在觉得，需要用药物来拯救”悲伤“。
The alternative, of course, is that depression has a secret purpose and our medical interventions are making a bad situation even worse. Like a fever that helps the immune system fight off infection — increased body temperature sends white blood cells into overdrive — depression might be an unpleasant yet adaptive response to affliction. Maybe Darwin was right. We suffer — we suffer terribly — but we don’t suffer in vain.
当然，另一种观点是，抑郁症有其特别的意义，而我们的医疗干预措施正使其更加恶化。正如发烧是免疫系统对感染的对抗反应——通过提高体温，使白细胞开始战斗；抑郁症可能是人们对痛苦的一种适应性反应。因此，也许达尔文是正确的，人们承受的痛苦愈演愈烈，但这种忍受并非徒劳。
ANDY THOMSON IS a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia. He has a scruffy gray beard and steep cheekbones. When Thomson talks, he tends to close his eyes, as if he needs to concentrate on what he’s saying. But mostly what he does is listen: For the last 32 years, Thomson has been tending to his private practice in Charlottesville. “I tend to get the real hard cases,” Thomson told me recently. “A lot of the people I see have already tried multiple treatments. They arrive without much hope.” On one of the days I spent with Thomson earlier this winter, he checked his phone constantly for e-mail updates. A patient of his on “welfare watch” who was required to check in with him regularly had not done so, and Thomson was worried. “I’ve never gotten used to treating patients in mental pain,” he said. “Maybe it’s because every story is unique. You see one case of iron-deficiency anemia, you’ve seen them all. But the people who walk into my office are all hurting for a different reason.”
Andy Thomsn是维吉尼亚大学的精神科医生。他高颧骨、留着灰白胡子。他说话的时候喜欢闭着眼睛，让你觉得他非常专注。但是更多情况下，他只是倾听。32年来，Thomson都在Charlottesvlle经营自己的私人诊所。“我一直都试着接待真正困难的个案”，Thomson最近跟我说“很多人来之前都试过很多种办法，来的时候都觉得没什么希望”。刚入冬的某一天，我跟他在一起，他不时地在他手机上查邮件。应该定时跟他联系的一个病人没有跟他联系，Thomson很担心。”我从未适应如何去治疗有精神痛苦的病人。这大概是因为每个故事都是独一无二的。比如说你见一个儿童期缺铁贫血的病人，得这种病的病人可能都一样。但是走进我办公室的人们，每个人的伤痛都有不同原因。
In the late 1990s, Thomson became interested in evolutionary psychology, which tries to explain the features of the human mind in terms of natural selection. The starting premise of the field is that the brain has a vast evolutionary history, and that this history shapes human nature. We are not a blank slate but a byproduct of imperfect adaptations, stuck with a mind that was designed to meet the needs of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers on the African savanna. While the specifics of evolutionary psychology remain controversial — it’s never easy proving theories about the distant past — its underlying assumption is largely accepted by mainstream scientists. There is no longer much debate over whether evolution sculptured the fleshy machine inside our head. Instead, researchers have moved on to new questions like when and how this sculpturing happened and which of our mental traits are adaptations and which are accidents.
1990年末，Thomson开始对进化心理学——也就是以自然选择的理论来解释人类思想——产生兴趣。这一研究领域的前提是，大脑拥有着庞大的进化历史，这一历史也塑造着人类的本质。人类并不是一块空白的石板，而是不完美适应下产生的副产品，连带着为了适应更新世(Pleistocene)时期非洲疏林草原的狩猎者，而产生的一系列思维习惯。尽管进化心理学的许多细节仍有争议——因为证明远古时代的理论从不是易事，但其中的假设已被主流科学家广泛接纳。关于进化是否塑造了人们的脑袋中运转着的“人肉机器”（大脑）也不再是一个有争议的话题。研究者们已经继续新的研究话题，如这一塑造是从什么时候开始，又是如何开始的。以及人们的心理特征中哪一个属于适应作用的影响，哪一个又纯属意外。
In 2004, Thomson met Paul Andrews, an evolutionary psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University, who had long been interested in the depression paradox — why a disorder that’s so costly is also so common. Andrews has long dark brown hair and an aquiline nose. Before he begins to talk, he often writes down an outline of his answer on scratch paper. “This is a very delicate subject,” he says. “I don’t want to say something reckless.”
2004年 Thomson 见到 Paul Andrews, Virginian Commonwealth 大学的一位进化心理进化心理学家。Andrews 长期以来对抑郁这个迷感兴趣 --- 为什么这样一个严重的疾病却同时这么常见。Andrews有着长长的棕发和鹰钩鼻。他是个讲话之前总会在草稿纸上写个提纲的人。他回答到，“这是一个非常微妙的课题，我不想草率作答”。
Andrews and Thomson struck up an extended conversation on the evolutionary roots of depression. They began by focusing on the thought process that defines the disorder, which is known as rumination. (The verb is derived from the Latin word for “chewed over,” which describes the act of digestion in cattle, in which they swallow, regurgitate and then rechew their food.) In recent decades, psychiatry has come to see rumination as a dangerous mental habit, because it leads people to fixate on their flaws and problems, thus extending their negative moods. Consider “The Depressed Person,” a short story by David Foster Wallace, which chronicles a consciousness in the grip of the ruminative cycle. (Wallace struggled with severe depression for years before committing suicide in 2008.) The story is a long lament, a portrait of a mind hating itself, filled with sentences like this: “What terms might be used to describe such a solipsistic, self-consumed, bottomless emotional vacuum and sponge as she now appeared to herself to be?” The dark thoughts of “The Depressed Person” soon grow tedious and trying, but that’s precisely Wallace’s point. There is nothing profound about depressive rumination. There is just a recursive loop of woe.
Andrew和Thomson对于抑郁症在进化过程中的根源进行了深入的探讨。他们开始定义这种疾病的思考过程，也就是沉思。（这个动词来源于拉丁语的“反刍”，用来形容牛吞咽、吐出并且再次咀嚼食物的消化过程。）在过去几十年间，精神病学视沉思为一种危险的心理习惯，因为它引导人们过度关注他们的缺点和问题，于是扩展了负面情绪。比如David Foster Wallace的短篇小说《抑郁的人》【1】记录了意识到个人深陷于反复沉思中的状态。（Wallace在2008自杀之前一直深受重度抑郁症折磨。这个故事是一篇描述自我厌恶的长悼词，字里行间充斥着这样的文字：“用什么样的词汇才能形容她眼中这样唯我主义、自私自利、无底洞般抽空情感的自己呢?”抑郁的沉思一点儿也不深刻，它只不过是悲哀的无限循环。
The bleakness of this thought process helps explain why, according to the Yale psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, people with “ruminative tendencies” are more likely to become depressed. They’re also more likely to become unnerved by stressful events: for instance, Nolen-Hoeksema found that residents of San Francisco who self-identified as ruminators showed significantly more depressive symptoms after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. And then there are the cognitive deficits. Because rumination hijacks the stream of consciousness — we become exquisitely attentive to our pain — numerous studies have found that depressed subjects struggle to think about anything else, just like Wallace’s character. The end result is poor performance on tests for memory and executive function, especially when the task involves lots of information. (These deficits disappear when test subjects are first distracted from their depression and thus better able to focus on the exercise.) Such research has reinforced the view that rumination is a useless kind of pessimism, a perfect waste of mental energy.
根据耶鲁心理学家Susan Nolen-Hoeksema的研究，这么凄惨的思维过程可以解释有“沉思倾向”的人为什么更容易抑郁。这种人也更容易在压力大的情况下气馁。Hoeksema发现在旧金山，自觉是思考者的人在1989年洛马普列塔地震后有更多抑郁症状。这些人还有思维缺陷——沉思阻挡了意识流，加上人们对自己的痛苦感觉更强烈——无数研究发现抑郁的研究对象很难去想抑郁以外的事，这跟Wallace一模一样。结果就是记忆和执行能力下降，尤其是任务信息量较大的时候。（这些问题在受试者首次摆脱抑郁后会消失，他们因而能在训练中更好地集中注意力。）这类研究支持“沉思是没用的悲观且浪费精力”这一论点。
That, at least, was the scientific consensus when Andrews and Thomson began exploring the depression paradox. Their evolutionary perspective, however — they see the mind as a fine-tuned machine that is not prone to pointless programming bugs — led them to wonder if rumination had a purpose. They started with the observation that rumination was often a response to a specific psychological blow, like the death of a loved one or the loss of a job. (Darwin was plunged into a debilitating grief after his 10-year-old daughter, Annie, died following a bout of scarlet fever.) Although the D.S.M. manual, the diagnostic bible for psychiatrists, does not take such stressors into account when diagnosing depressive disorder — the exception is grief caused by bereavement, as long as the grief doesn’t last longer than two months — it’s clear that the problems of everyday life play a huge role in causing mental illness. “Of course, rumination is unpleasant,” Andrews says. “But it’s usually a response to something real, a real setback. It didn’t seem right that the brain would go haywire just when we need it most.”
［而Andrews和Thomson从进化的角度看，人的心智是精密的仪器，不会出现毫无意义的差错。于是他们觉得沉思还有其他用途。他们发现，沉思是对特定心理打击的反映，比如爱的人去世或者丢了工作。（达尔文在10岁的女儿安妮患猩红热去世后悲痛得奄奄一息）精神疾病诊断与统计手册这一精神病医生圣经并没有将这类刺激划入诊断抑郁症的条件，除非丧亲之痛持续了两个月以上——显然，日常生活中的矛盾对精神疾病也有很大影响。Andrews说：“沉思是挺不爽的，但它也是对真实、挫折的反映。只是当我们最需要清醒的思维时，它却乱套了。这就不太好了。”］
Imagine, for instance, a depression triggered by a bitter divorce. The ruminations might take the form of regret (“I should have been a better spouse”), recurring counterfactuals (“What if I hadn’t had my affair?”) and anxiety about the future (“How will the kids deal with it? Can I afford my alimony payments?”). While such thoughts reinforce the depression — that’s why therapists try to stop the ruminative cycle — Andrews and Thomson wondered if they might also help people prepare for bachelorhood or allow people to learn from their mistakes. “I started thinking about how, even if you are depressed for a few months, the depression might be worth it if it helps you better understand social relationships,” Andrews says. “Maybe you realize you need to be less rigid or more loving. Those are insights that can come out of depression, and they can be very valuable.”
比如说，想象一下因痛苦离婚而导致的抑郁症。沉思或许会以这些形式出现：后悔（“我应该做一个更好的配偶”），反复设想与现实相反的状况（“我要是没有出轨呢？”）或者对未来的焦虑（“孩子们会怎样调节?我有能力交付赡养费么？”“孩子们会怎么想？我是否付得起赡养费？”）的确这些念头会强化抑郁症—这正是为什么心理医生会试图停止这种循环的沉思—Andrews和Thomson好奇这些念头是否能同样能帮助人们更好准备进入单身生活或者帮助人们从自己的错误中学习。［Andrews和Thomson认为，治疗师也应该帮助人们为单身做准备或者让人们从错误中学习。］“我开始想，或许尽管你会郁闷好几个月，但它让你可以更好的了解社交关系从而使得抑郁症有价值。［就算你已经抑郁了几个月，抑郁也会让你对人际关系有更深入的理解］”Andrews说，“也许你意识到自己应该不那么固执或者应该更加忠诚。这是由抑郁而得出的领悟，它们可能是十分珍贵的。”
This radical idea — the scientists were suggesting that depressive disorder came with a net mental benefit — has a long intellectual history. Aristotle was there first, stating in the fourth century B.C. “that all men who have attained excellence in philosophy, in poetry, in art and in politics, even Socrates and Plato, had a melancholic habitus; indeed some suffered even from melancholic disease.” This belief was revived during the Renaissance, leading Milton to exclaim, in his poem “Il Penseroso”: “Hail divinest Melancholy/Whose saintly visage is too bright/To hit the sense of human sight.” The Romantic poets took the veneration of sadness to its logical extreme and described suffering as a prerequisite for the literary life. As Keats wrote, “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”
这两位科学家认为，伴随抑郁症而来的，是精神的提升。这个激进的观点在知识史上颇有渊源。亚里士多德在公元前4世纪就第一个曰过：“一切在哲学、诗歌、艺术、政治领域成绩卓著的人，即使苏格拉底和柏拉图也不例外，都是忧郁的常客；一些人甚至受到抑郁症的折磨。”这一观点在文艺复兴时期再度兴起，让弥尔顿在《沉思者》中呐喊：“赞美你！至为神圣的忧郁/你圣洁的容颜太过灿烂/灼伤了凡人的视觉”。浪漫主义时期的诗人们将对悲伤的崇敬推向极致。并将经受苦难视为文学生涯的先决条件。正如济慈所言：“你难道看不出一个充满痛苦的世界有多么重要？苦难能培育智慧，赋予它灵魂。”
But Andrews and Thomson weren’t interested in ancient aphorisms or poetic apologias. Their daunting challenge was to show how rumination might lead to improved outcomes, especially when it comes to solving life’s most difficult dilemmas. Their first speculations focused on the core features of depression, like the inability of depressed subjects to experience pleasure or their lack of interest in food, sex and social interactions. According to Andrews and Thomson, these awful symptoms came with a productive side effect, because they reduced the possibility of becoming distracted from the pressing problem.
但是 Andrews 和 Thomson 对古老的格言警句或诗歌辩解并不感兴趣。他们真正面临的挑战是证明沉思所带来的更好的结果，尤其在解决生活中的重大难题时。他们第一个假设集中在抑郁症的核心特征，比如抑郁症患者无法体验愉悦，或者他们对食物、性、以及社交的缺乏兴趣。［比如抑郁者对食物、性和人际交往都没有兴趣也无法从中得到快乐。］按照 Andrews 和 Thomson 的说法，这些糟糕的病征也有着有益的副作用，因为这些症状使患者不必面对其他迫切问题。
The capacity for intense focus, they note, relies in large part on a brain area called the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), which is located a few inches behind the forehead. While this area has been associated with a wide variety of mental talents, like conceptual knowledge and verb conjugation, it seems to be especially important for maintaining attention. Experiments show that neurons in the VLPFC must fire continuously to keep us on task so that we don’t become sidetracked by irrelevant information. Furthermore, deficits in the VLPFC have been associated with attention-deficit disorder.
注意力的高度集中，他们提到，大部分需要依靠大脑的一个叫做左腹外侧前额叶（VLPFC)的区域。它在额头后方几英寸的位置。虽然这个区域与许多心智才能-如理性认知和动词连配-有关，它对于保持注意力似乎也十分重要。研究显示，VLPFC的神经元必须持续保持活跃，以使我们专注于当前的任务，而不被其他不相关的信息所分心。另外，VLPFC区域的损坏也被认为与多动症有关。
Several studies found an increase in brain activity (as measured indirectly by blood flow) in the VLPFC of depressed patients. Most recently, a paper to be published next month by neuroscientists in China found a spike in “functional connectivity” between the lateral prefrontal cortex and other parts of the brain in depressed patients, with more severe depressions leading to more prefrontal activity. One explanation for this finding is that the hyperactive VLPFC underlies rumination, allowing people to stay focused on their problem. (Andrews and Thomson argue that this relentless fixation also explains the cognitive deficits of depressed subjects, as they are too busy thinking about their real-life problems to bother with an artificial lab exercise; their VLPFC can’t be bothered to care.) Human attention is a scarce resource — the neural effects of depression make sure the resource is efficiently allocated.
一些研究表明，抑郁症病人的左腹外侧前额叶（VLPFC）大脑活动增加（间接通过测量血流量得知）。最近，即将在下月发表的一篇论文中，中国的神经科学家们在抑郁症病人的大脑中找到了一种在侧前额叶皮层和大脑其他部分具有“功能性连接”的脉冲.（好难顺这个句子...）抑郁症病情越严重，大脑前额叶皮层的活动越活跃。一个可能的解释为过分活跃的VLPFC区域是沉思活动的基础，能让人们专注于他们的问题（Andrew和Thompson认为，这项不停止的修正也解释了抑郁症病人的认知障碍，因为他们太过于专注思考他们现实生活中的问题，而不屑于实验室里的artificial excercise; VLPFC根本不屑于关注这些问题。) 人类的注意力是一项稀有资源--抑郁症的神经效应确保这些资源可以得到有效分配。
But the reliance on the VLPFC doesn’t just lead us to fixate on our depressing situation; it also leads to an extremely analytical style of thinking. That’s because rumination is largely rooted in working memory, a kind of mental scratchpad that allows us to “work” with all the information stuck in consciousness. When people rely on working memory — and it doesn’t matter if they’re doing long division or contemplating a relationship gone wrong — they tend to think in a more deliberate fashion, breaking down their complex problems into their simpler parts.
但是，对左腹外侧前额叶（VLPFC）的依赖并不仅仅使我们沉浸于抑郁状态，它也会产生一种极具分析性的思维方式。这是由于沉思主要源自工作记忆，也即一种便笺式精神存储器，可使我们利用陷入知觉之中的所有信息来进行工作。无论是在做长除法运算或是沉思一段槽糕的感情经历,这都不太重要，当人们依赖于工作记忆时，他们就会以一种更加审慎的方式来进行思考，会把问题化繁为简。
The bad news is that this deliberate thought process is slow, tiresome and prone to distraction; the prefrontal cortex soon grows exhausted and gives out. Andrews and Thomson see depression as a way of bolstering our feeble analytical skills, making it easier to pay continuous attention to a difficult dilemma. The downcast mood and activation of the VLPFC are part of a “coordinated system” that, Andrews and Thomson say, exists “for the specific purpose of effectively analyzing the complex life problem that triggered the depression.” If depression didn’t exist — if we didn’t react to stress and trauma with endless ruminations — then we would be less likely to solve our predicaments. Wisdom isn’t cheap, and we pay for it with pain.
一个并不好的消息是这种“刻意”的思维过程十分缓慢，累人且注意力容易被分散，前额皮质很容易疲惫不堪。Anderw和Thomson把抑郁看作加强我们衰弱的分析能力的一种方式，让我们更容易将持续的注意力投向进退两难的困境。据Andrew和Thomson称，沮丧情绪和左腹外侧前额叶（VLPFC）是协调系统的一部分，其存在目的在于“有效分析会引起抑郁的的复杂生活问题”。如果抑郁不存在，如果我们不应对压力和精神创伤并反复深思，我们很可能无法解决我们的困境。智慧并不是廉价的，我们需要付出或许痛苦的代价。
Consider a young professor on tenure track who was treated by Thomson. The patient was having difficulties with his academic department. “This guy was used to success coming easy, but now it wasn’t,” Thomson says. “I made it clear that I thought he’d need some time to figure out his next step. His problem was like a splinter, and the pain wouldn’t go away until the splinter was removed.” Should the patient leave the department? Should he leave academia? Or should he try to resolve the disagreement? Over the next several weeks, Thomson helped the patient analyze his situation and carefully think through the alternatives. “We took it one variable at a time,” Thomson says. “And it eventually became clear to him that the departmental issues couldn’t be fixed. He needed to leave. Once he came to that conclusion, he started feeling better.”
比如Thomson在治疗一个有着终身教职的年轻教授。这个病人在自己的院系里面遇到些困难。“这个人以前一直顺风顺水，但现在遇到问题了，”Thomson说，“我很清楚地告诉他，他需要给自己些时间，想想自己接下来怎么办。他的问题就像个扎进指头的小碎片，不拿出来，就一直疼“。这个病人是应该离开这个院系？离开学术圈？或者他应该努力去解决争端？在接下来的几周内，Thomson帮助这个来访者分析他的状况，仔细地考虑各种选择。”我们每次解决一个问题“Thomson说，”而后慢慢他意识到院系的问题是无法解决的。他应该离开。一旦他有个定论，他就开始觉得好一些“。
The publication of Andrews and Thomson’s 36,000-word paper in the July 2009 issue of Psychological Review had a polarizing effect on the field. While some researchers, like Jerome Wakefield, a professor at New York University who specializes in the conceptual foundations of clinical theory, greeted the paper as “an extremely important first step toward the re-evaluation of depression,” other psychiatrists regarded it as little more than irresponsible speculation, a justification for human suffering. Peter Kramer, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University, describes the paper as “a ladder with a series of weak rungs.” Kramer has long defended the use of antidepressants — his landmark work, “Listening to Prozac,” chronicled the profound improvements of patients taking the drugs — and criticized those who romanticized depression, which he compares to the glamorization of tuberculosis in the late 19th century. In a series of e-mail messages to me, Kramer suggested that Andrews and Thomson neglect the variants of depression that don’t fit their evolutionary theory. “This study says nothing about chronic depression and the sort of self-hating, paralyzing, hopeless, circular rumination it inspires,” Kramer wrote. And what about post-stroke depression? Late-life depression? Extreme depressive condition? Kramer argues that there’s a clear category difference between a healthy response to social stressors and the response of people with depressive disorder. “Depression is not really like sadness,” Kramer has written. “It’s more an oppressive flattening of feeling.”
Andrews 和Thomson长达36000字的相关论文，2009年7月发表于Psychological Review（译者注：心理学界影响力极大的期刊）之后，在该领域内激起了两极分化的反响。一些科学家赞同这篇论文，认为“在抑郁症重新评价上迈出了意义重大的第一步”，例如纽约大学的Jerome Wakefield教授，他致力于临床理论的概念构建；其他精神病学家则认为这个理论比不负责任的猜测好不到哪去，只是在洗白人类的苦难。Peter Kramer，布朗大学的精神病学和人类行为学教授，将这篇论文比作“由一堆不怎么牢靠的木板搭起的梯子”。Kramer一直是抗抑郁药物疗效的捍卫者——他的代表作《聆听百忧解》记述的正是服用该药物的患者所经历的深刻变化 ，他批评那些将抑郁症浪漫化的倾向，认为这种做法无异于19世纪末对肺结核的美化。在发给我的一系列电子邮件中，Kramer认为Andrew 和Thomson忽略了那些与其革命性理论不相符的抑郁类型。“这项研究完全没有提到慢性抑郁症，和由此引发的自我憎恨、瘫痪、无助和循环反复思考。”Kramer这样写道。此外，中风后抑郁，老年抑郁症，还有极端抑郁的情形呢？Kramer主张，面对社会压力源，健康的反应和抑郁症患者的反应属于两个截然不同的范畴。“抑郁和悲伤不太一样，”Kramer写道，“抑郁更像是一片压迫式的扁平情感。
Even scientists who are sympathetic to what Andrews and Thomson call the “analytic-rumination hypothesis” remain critical of its details. Ed Hagen, an anthropologist at Washington State University who is working on a book with Andrews, says that while the analytic-rumination hypothesis has persuaded him that some depressive symptoms might improve problem-solving skills, he remains unconvinced that it is a sufficient explanation for depression. “Individuals with major depression often don’t groom, bathe and sometimes don’t even use the toilet,” Hagen says. They also significantly “reduce investment in child care,” which could have detrimental effects on the survival of offspring. The steep fitness costs of these behaviors, Hagen says, would not be offset by “more uninterrupted time to think.”
即使那些赞同Andrews和Thomson的“分析式沉思假说”说法的科学家们，对这个假说的细节仍保留批判的态度。目前跟Andrews合作写书的来自华盛顿大学的人类学家Ed Hagen表示，虽然“分析式沉思假说”让他认同某些抑郁症状可能提高解决问题的能力，但他仍不认为这能完全解释抑郁症。“有严重抑郁症的病人常常不修边幅，无视个人卫生，有时甚至不用洗手间，”Hagen说。他们经常大幅度地“削减花费在照顾孩子上的投资”，而这往往严重威胁到下一代的生存。这些行为带来的严重健康后果，Hagen说，不会被更多“不被打断的沉思”抵消。
Other scientists, including Randolph Nesse at the University of Michigan, say that complex psychiatric disorders like depression rarely have simple evolutionary explanations. In fact, the analytic-rumination hypothesis is merely the latest attempt to explain the prevalence of depression. There is, for example, the “plea for help” theory, which suggests that depression is a way of eliciting assistance from loved ones. There’s also the “signal of defeat” hypothesis, which argues that feelings of despair after a loss in social status help prevent unnecessary attacks; we’re too busy sulking to fight back. And then there’s “depressive realism”: several studies have found that people with depression have a more accurate view of reality and are better at predicting future outcomes. While each of these speculations has scientific support, none are sufficient to explain an illness that afflicts so many people. The moral, Nesse says, is that sadness, like happiness, has many functions.
其他科学家们，包括密歇根大学的Randolph Nesse，认为复杂的精神问题像是抑郁[像抑郁这样复杂的精神问题]很少有单纯而革命性的解释。事实上，分析式沉思（analytic-rumination）的理论仅仅是最新的较为被接受的关于抑郁的解释。其他的理论比如说，“乞求帮助”的理论，提出抑郁是一种从亲爱的人博得协助的方式。同时，“防御信号”理论提出，社会地位的下降之后的绝望情绪帮助防御不必要的打击。我们忙于生气的同时便无暇反击。关于“抑郁现实主义”：一些研究发现抑郁的人有更准确的现实判断并且预测未来的准确性更高。即使每一个理论的提出都有科学依据，目前并无一者能够完全解释这种困扰无数人的疾病。其意义，Nesse称，沮丧和开心有许多（不为人知的）功能。[在Nesse看来其意义在于，如同快乐一样，悲伤也有许多功能。]
Although Nesse says he admires the analytic-rumination hypothesis, he adds that it fails to capture the heterogeneity of depressive disorder. Andrews and Thomson compare depression to a fever helping to fight off infection, but Nesse says a more accurate metaphor is chronic pain, which can arise for innumerable reasons. “Sometimes, the pain is going to have an organic source,” he says. “Maybe you’ve slipped a disc or pinched a nerve, in which case you’ve got to solve that underlying problem. But much of the time there is no origin for the pain. The pain itself is the dysfunction.”
尽管Nesse表示他很欣赏分析沉思设想，但他也表示表现抑郁症多样性是不可能的。Andrews和Thomson将抑郁和击感染的发烧进行对比，但Nesses说更准确的形容应该是慢性疼痛。有时候，疼痛源自器官，”他说，“也可能是椎间盘突出或是神经受到积压，这些情况下你能应对问题的根源，但更多情况是没有来源的疼痛，疼痛本身就是功能障碍。”
Andrews and Thomson respond to such criticisms by acknowledging that depression is a vast continuum, a catch-all term for a spectrum of symptoms. While the analytic-rumination hypothesis might explain those patients reacting to an “acute stressor,” it can’t account for those whose suffering has no discernible cause or whose sadness refuses to lift for years at a time. “To say that depression can be useful doesn’t mean it’s always going to be useful,” Thomson says. “Sometimes, the symptoms can spiral out of control. The problem, though, is that as a society, we’ve come to see depression as something that must always be avoided or medicated away. We’ve been so eager to remove the stigma from depression that we’ve ended up stigmatizing sadness.”
Andrews and Thomson 在回应批评中承认抑郁是漫长的连续体，是个包罗万象的症状。分析理论式（ analytic-rumination hypothesis）或许解释了这些有“紧张性刺激”的患者，然而并不能解释那些并无明显原因或者那些悲伤情绪几年都没有好转的患者。抑郁可以是有用的,但并不意味着它总是有用的。有时症状会急剧失控。问题是，人们把抑郁当作是必须避免或必须治疗的病。我们很想消除这个根深蒂固的想法，并已经不再侮蔑悲哀了。
For Thomson, this new theory of depression has directly affected his medical practice. “That’s the litmus test for me,” he says. “Do these ideas help me treat my patients better?” In recent years, Thomson has cut back on antidepressant prescriptions, because, he says, he now believes that the drugs can sometimes interfere with genuine recovery, making it harder for people to resolve their social dilemmas. “I remember one patient who came in and said she needed to reduce her dosage,” he says. “I asked her if the antidepressants were working, and she said something I’ll never forget. ‘Yes, they’re working great,’ she told me. ‘I feel so much better. But I’m still married to the same alcoholic son of a bitch. It’s just now he’s tolerable.’ ”
对Thomson来说，抑郁症的新理论已经对他的医学实践产生了直接影响，“那对我来说只是个石蕊测试罢了，”他说。“那些新想法有帮助我更好的医治我的病人吗？”最近这些年，Thomson已经减少了抗抑郁剂的药方，因为他觉得药物可能会妨碍基因的自身复原，让人们更难解决他们的社交困境。“我记得一个病人到我办公室来说她需要减少她的药物剂量，”他说，“我告诉她如果抗抑郁剂能起作用就没有必要，但是她说有一些事她永远不可能忘记就算服药也不能。‘是的，那药很有用，’她这样告诉我告诉我，‘我感觉好多了，但是我的丈夫仍然是个混蛋，但是现在我至少能够容忍他。’”
The point is the woman was depressed for a reason; her pain was about something. While the drugs made her feel better, no real progress was ever made. Thomson’s skepticism about antidepressants is bolstered by recent studies questioning their benefits, at least for patients with moderate depression. Consider a 2005 paper led by Steven Hollon, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University: he found that people on antidepressants had a 76 percent chance of relapse within a year when the drugs were discontinued. In contrast, patients given a form of cognitive talk therapy had a relapse rate of 31 percent. And Hollon’s data aren’t unusual: several studies found that patients treated with medication were approximately twice as likely to relapse as patients treated with cognitive behavior therapy. “The high relapse rate suggests that the drugs aren’t really solving anything,” Thomson says. “In fact, they seem to be interfering with the solution, so that patients are discouraged from dealing with their problems. We end up having to keep people on the drugs forever. It was as if these people have a bodily infection, and modern psychiatry is just treating their fever.”
重点是女人感到沮丧的原因是源于某些令她感到痛苦的事情。在药物让她感觉到好一些的同时，病情并没有真正的进展。Thomson对抗抑郁药的怀疑在最近一些质疑药物对于至少中度抑郁症患者益处的研究中得到支持。范德堡大学心理学家Hollon在其2005年的论文中提到：他发现停止服药的抑郁症患者有76%的可能在一年内复发，相反，接受认知谈话疗法的患者，复发率为31%。Hollon的数据并不是唯一的：一些研究发现用使用药物治疗的患者病情复发率是接受认知行为疗法患者的近两倍。“高复发率表明药物未能解决任何问题”Thomson说道。“事实上，它们似乎还干扰了解决方案，导致患者对他们难题的解决感到失望。这些人终身需要服药，这就好像这些人的病情是身体感染，而现在精神病学只能治疗他们的高烧。”
Thomson describes a college student who was referred to his practice. “It was clear that this patient was in a lot of pain,” Thomson says. “He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t study. He had some family issues” — his parents were recently divorced — “and his father was exerting a tremendous amount of pressure on him to go to graduate school. Because he’s got a family history of depression, the standard of care would be to put him on drugs right away. And a few years ago, that’s what I would have done.”
Thomson 讲述了一个被转介到他诊所的大学生。“很明显,这个病人是很痛苦,” Thomson说，“他无法入睡,无法学习。他有一些家庭问题”——他的父母最近离婚了——”他父亲让他去读研究生，给他很大的压力。因为他有抑郁症家族史,标准的治疗会让他马上服药。而在几年前,我会这样做的。”
Instead, Thomson was determined to help the student solve his problem. “What you’re trying to do is speed along the rumination process,” Thomson says. “Once you show people the dilemma they need to solve, they almost always start feeling better.” He cites as evidence a recent study that found “expressive writing” — asking depressed subjects to write essays about their feelings — led to significantly shorter depressive episodes. The reason, Thomson suggests, is that writing is a form of thinking, which enhances our natural problem-solving abilities. “This doesn’t mean there’s some miracle cure,” he says. “In most cases, the recovery period is going to be long and difficult. And that’s what I told this young student. I said: ‘I know you’re hurting. I know these problems seem impossible. But they’re not. And I can help you solve them.’ ”
Thomson决定帮助这个学生解决困难。“你要做的是迅速完成沉思过程，”Thomas说，“一旦你告诉人们需要解决的问题，他们就差不多开始好转了。”他引用最近表达性书写的研究——让抑郁者就自己的感受写篇文章，显著缩短了抑郁发作时间。Thomson认为，写作是一种提高自然解决问题能力的思考。“这并不意味着这是什么灵丹妙药,"他说，“在很多案例中，治愈阶段又难又长，我告诉那个学生：‘我知道你很受伤，我知道这些问题看似没法解决，但其实不是，我可以帮你’。”
IT’S TOO SOON to judge the analytic-rumination hypothesis. Nobody knows if depression is an adaptation or if Andrews and Thomson have merely spun another “Just So” story, a clever evolutionary tale that lacks direct evidence. Nevertheless, their speculation is part of a larger scientific re-evaluation of negative moods, which have long been seen as emotional states to avoid. The dismissal of sadness and its synonyms is perhaps best exemplified by the rise of positive psychology, a scientific field devoted to the pursuit of happiness. In recent years, a number of positive psychologists have written popular self-help books, like “The How of Happiness” and “Authentic Happiness,” that try to outline the scientific principles behind “lasting fulfillment” and “getting the life we want.”
评价沉思分析猜想还为时过早。没人知道抑郁症是不是适应性的，或Andrews和Thomson仅仅是扯了一个符合进化论但缺乏证据只能自圆其说的故事。然而，他们的猜想符合大部分对负面情绪的评估——负面情绪是情感上的回避。甩掉悲哀及其同义词 可以看作是积极心理学兴起的典例。积极心理学致力于追求快乐。近几年，好些积极心理学家写了很多畅销自助书籍，比如《快乐方法论》和《真正的快乐》，都在简述“持久的满足”、“过自己想要的生活”背后的科学原理。
The new research on negative moods, however, suggests that sadness comes with its own set of benefits and that even our most unpleasant feelings serve an important purpose. Joe Forgas, a social psychologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia, has repeatedly demonstrated in experiments that negative moods lead to better decisions in complex situations. The reason, Forgas suggests, is rooted in the intertwined nature of mood and cognition: sadness promotes “information-processing strategies best suited to dealing with more-demanding situations.” This helps explain why test subjects who are melancholy — Forgas induces the mood with a short film about death and cancer — are better at judging the accuracy of rumors and recalling past events; they’re also much less likely to stereotype strangers.
负面情感的新研究表示，悲哀也有一系列好处，就是最难过的情绪也有重要的用途。澳大利亚新南威尔士大学的社会心理学家Joe Forgas反复阐述在复杂情况中，负面情感使被试作出更好的抉择。Forgas认为，其根源在于情感与认知相纠结的本质。悲哀促进“最佳多需求信息处理的策略”。这也可以解释为什么看完死亡与癌症短片的忧郁的被试能更准确地判断谣言，回想起过去的事，对陌生人也没有很多成见。
Last year Forgas ventured beyond the lab and began conducting studies in a small stationery store in suburban Sydney, Australia. The experiment itself was simple: Forgas placed a variety of trinkets, like toy soldiers, plastic animals and miniature cars, near the checkout counter. As shoppers exited, Forgas tested their memory, asking them to list as many of the items as possible. To control for the effect of mood, Forgas conducted the survey on gray, rainy days — he accentuated the weather by playing Verdi’s “Requiem” — and on sunny days, using a soundtrack of Gilbert and Sullivan. The results were clear: shoppers in the “low mood” condition remembered nearly four times as many of the trinkets. The wet weather made them sad, and their sadness made them more aware and attentive.
去年Forgas冒险走出实验室，在悉尼城郊一家小文具用品店进行了一项研究。实验很简单。Forgas在收款台摆了些小装饰品，像玩具兵，塑料动物，微型小车之类的。当购物者兴奋时， Forgas测试他们的记忆，让他们尽可能列举有几样摆设。为了控制情绪，Forgas在阴雨天做这个调查。他播放威尔第的《安魂曲》、Gilbert and Sullivan的电影原声来强化天气的影响。结果很明显，情绪不好的购物者记住了四倍多的摆件。潮湿的天气使他们悲哀，而悲哀让他们更细心留意。
The enhancement of these mental skills might also explain the striking correlation between creative production and depressive disorders. In a survey led by the neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen, 30 writers from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop were interviewed about their mental history. Eighty percent of the writers met the formal diagnostic criteria for some form of depression. A similar theme emerged from biographical studies of British writers and artists by Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, who found that successful individuals were eight times as likely as people in the general population to suffer from major depressive illness.
这些心智技能的提升也许也解释了创造性产出和抑郁症之间的惊人联系.在由神经学家Nancy Andreasen所领导的一项调查中,采访了来自爱荷华作家工作坊的30位作者的心路历程.他们中的80%都达到了某类正规抑郁症的诊断标准.在Johns Hopkins大学的精神病学教授Kay Redfield对英国作家和艺术家个人简历的研究中也发现了相似的情况,即成功人士患抑郁症的可能是一般大众的八倍.
Why is mental illness so closely associated with creativity? Andreasen argues that depression is intertwined with a “cognitive style” that makes people more likely to produce successful works of art. In the creative process, Andreasen says, “one of the most important qualities is persistence.” Based on the Iowa sample, Andreasen found that “successful writers are like prizefighters who keep on getting hit but won’t go down. They’ll stick with it until it’s right.” While Andreasen acknowledges the burden of mental illness — she quotes Robert Lowell on depression not being a “gift of the Muse” and describes his reliance on lithium to escape the pain — she argues that many forms of creativity benefit from the relentless focus it makes possible. “Unfortunately, this type of thinking is often inseparable from the suffering,” she says. “If you’re at the cutting edge, then you’re going to bleed.”
为什么心理疾病和创造力这么息息相关？Andreasen 认为与抑郁紧密结合的一种“思维方式”，能够让人们更有可能创作出成功的艺术作品。在创造过程中，Andreasen 说，“最重要的能力是坚持。”基于Iowa 的样本，Andreasen 发现 “成功的作家就像是永远打不垮的斗士。他们坚持到把活儿做好。”虽然 Andreasen 承认心理疾病的重负 -- 她引用 Robert Lowell 对抑郁症的描述 “不是缪斯的礼物” 并形容他是如何依靠锂（译者注：是一种金属，也是治疗抑郁的药物）来逃离痛苦 -- 她据理力争说很多创造力得益于抑郁带来的极大的注意力集中。“很遗憾，这种形式的思考和痛苦无法分离”，她说，“如果你在领域的前沿，你不可避免要受伤。”
And then there’s the virtue of self-loathing, which is one of the symptoms of depression. When people are stuck in the ruminative spiral, their achievements become invisible; the mind is only interested in what has gone wrong. While this condition is typically linked to withdrawal and silence — people become unwilling to communicate — there’s some suggestive evidence that states of unhappiness can actually improve our expressive abilities. Forgas said he has found that sadness correlates with clearer and more compelling sentences, and that negative moods “promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style.” Because we’re more critical of what we’re writing, we produce more refined prose, the sentences polished by our angst. As Roland Barthes observed, “A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.”
再来是自我厌恶的优点,这也是抑郁的一个征兆.当人们陷在螺旋形思维模式中时,他们就会无视自己的成就;心心念念的只是到底哪儿出了差错.虽然这种情况一般与回避和沉默紧紧相连--人们开始失去交流的欲望--但有些具有启发性的证据表明不快乐的状态实际上会提升我们自我表达的能力.Forgas说他发现悲伤与那些表达的更加清晰更具说服力的句子相关联,并且负面情绪"促成了一个更具体,更宽松并且最终更加成功有效的沟通方式."因为我们对自己所写的东西要求更为严格,我们就会写出更为精致的散文,字句会在我们的焦虑下被打磨抛光.正如Roland Barthes指出,"觉得写作是一个难题的作者才是个具有创造力的作者."
This line of research led Andrews to conduct his own experiment, as he sought to better understand the link between negative mood and improved analytical abilities. He gave 115 undergraduates an abstract-reasoning test known as Raven’s Progressive Matrices, which requires subjects to identify a missing segment in a larger pattern. (Performance on the task strongly predicts general intelligence.) The first thing Andrews found was that nondepressed students showed an increase in “depressed affect” after taking the test. In other words, the mere presence of a challenging problem — even an abstract puzzle — induced a kind of attentive trance, which led to feelings of sadness. It doesn’t matter if we’re working on a mathematical equation or working through a broken heart: the anatomy of focus is inseparable from the anatomy of melancholy. This suggests that depressive disorder is an extreme form of an ordinary thought process, part of the dismal machinery that draws us toward our problems, like a magnet to metal.
这个方向上的研究让Andrews开始进行自己的实验,他试图更好的去了解消极情绪和分析能力提升之间的联系.他给115个本科生进行了被称为瑞文标准推理测验(Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices 简称 SPM)的抽象推理测试,它需要被试辨别一个大的图形中缺失的部分是哪块.(在任务中的表现很好的反应了智力水平.)Andrews首先发现的是没有抑郁症的学生在参加测试后反而抑郁水平有所升高.换句话说,仅仅是一个有挑战性的问题--甚至是个抽象的难题--会引导出细微的恍惚,从而感觉到悲伤.不管是我们正在解决一个数学等式或者心力憔悴都不会有什么关系:要分解注意力是离不开对惆怅的分析的.这表明抑郁症是一种普通的思维过程的某种极端形式,是将我们引导到我们自身问题的某种低落的情绪机制的一部份,就像磁铁对金属的吸引.
But is that closeness effective? Does the despondency help us solve anything? Andrews found a significant correlation between depressed affect and individual performance on the intelligence test, at least once the subjects were distracted from their pain: lower moods were associated with higher scores. “The results were clear,” Andrews says. “Depressed affect made people think better.” The challenge, of course, is persuading people to accept their misery, to embrace the tonic of despair. To say that depression has a purpose or that sadness makes us smarter says nothing about its awfulness. A fever, after all, might have benefits, but we still take pills to make it go away. This is the paradox of evolution: even if our pain is useful, the urge to escape from the pain remains the most powerful instinct of all.
但是,这种相似是否真的有效？垂头丧气能帮我们解决任何问题么?Andrews发现抑郁情感和个人在智力测验上的表现有着显著相关的,至少一旦当被试从痛苦中解脱出来就会这样:情绪低落与高分相互联系.Andrews说:"结果非常明显,抑郁情感让人们能够更好的思考"当然,所面临的挑战是如何劝说人们接受他们的痛苦,去拥抱绝望带来的激励.如果说抑郁或者悲伤的目的是让我们更加聪敏那就无视了它的糟糕之处.毕竟,发烧也许会有益处,但我们还是会服药来赶走病魔.这就是进化的矛盾之处:即使我们的痛苦是有用的,从中逃离的冲动仍是最强大的本能.
Jonah Lehrer is the author of “How We Decide” and of the blog The Frontal Cortex. This is his first article for the magazine.
Jonah Lehrer是"我们如何决策"和博客"前额叶皮层"的作者.这是他为杂志所作的第一篇文章.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: March 14, 2010
An article on Feb. 28 about the benefits of depression misstated the name of a university in Australia where studies have been done on the subject. It is the University of New South Wales, not South Wales.
本文已根据以下做出纠正:
纠正:2010年3月14日
2月28日关于抑郁症的好处的文章弄错了被试所在的一所澳大利亚大学的名称.该大学是新南威尔士大学,而不是南威尔士大学.
注：【1】@小魔障 提供扩展阅读：文中提到的David Wallace的the depressed person 的PDF版 http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-01-0059425.pdf
[2] Nemo （http://www.douban.com/people/65872310/）今天提到关于本文中rumination的翻译：
“今天上课突然发现心理学对rumination有单独的定义。根据wiki，rumination指 the compulsively focused attention on the symptoms of one's distress, and on its possible causes and consequences, as opposed to its solutions. 特点为只想过去带有负面情感的事儿。我记得翻译里好像说的是“沉思”来着，对照中文的话，貌似不太准确。 ”
收录于：协同翻译系列文章(Let's Have Fun!)
@峰哥何峰 这次我被分配到了黄颜色：) // 好多第一次来的朋友！
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@舞兰 啊咧 颜色要被用完了~ have fun啦~
@Anonymous 这么少女粉红色用不惯啊啊 （可以换颜色哈！）
@Mr李先生在 橙子的颜色 多补充vc
@now here_ 高中生水平不够话的轻拍....
@Peter Han 第一次来。
@Mning 第一次来nice to meet you.
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@Joyce 第一次来尝试，对拖延很治愈 ^ ^
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@pb2002 翻不好我可能会抑郁
=======================
原文链接 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/magazine/28depression-t.html
Depression’s Upside
By JONAH LEHRER
February 28, 2010
抑郁的好处
作者 Jonah Lehrer
2010年2月28日
The Victorians had many names for depression, and Charles Darwin used them all. There were his “fits” brought on by “excitements,” “flurries” leading to an “uncomfortable palpitation of the heart” and “air fatigues” that triggered his “head symptoms.” In one particularly pitiful letter, written to a specialist in “psychological medicine,” he confessed to “extreme spasmodic daily and nightly flatulence” and “hysterical crying” whenever Emma, his devoted wife, left him alone.
维多利亚时代人们对抑郁症有很多称谓，查尔斯达尔文（译者注：就是提出进化论那位）把这些词用了一个遍。有因为“兴奋”所以“歇斯底里”；“百爪挠心”导致“心悸不适”；还有“疲惫不堪的感觉”引发”头部不适“。在一封特别悲情的信里面，他向一个“医学心理”领域的专家承认：每当他的挚爱妻子Emma把他独自撇下的时候，他就“没日没夜极端痉挛的胀气”和“歇斯底里的哭泣”。
While there has been endless speculation about Darwin’s mysterious ailment — his symptoms have been attributed to everything from lactose intolerance to Chagas disease — Darwin himself was most troubled by his recurring mental problems. His depression left him “not able to do anything one day out of three,” choking on his “bitter mortification.” He despaired of the weakness of mind that ran in his family. “The ‘race is for the strong,’ ” Darwin wrote. “I shall probably do little more but be content to admire the strides others made in Science.”
对于达尔文的迷一样的疾病，有无穷无尽的猜测 --- 他的病征被归罪于各种疾病，从乳糖不耐受到 Chagas [南美锥虫]病 --- 达尔文自己最纠结的则是他的反复出现的心理问题。他的抑郁让他“三天中有一天啥也干不了，” 被自己“苦恼的尴尬”憋死。他对家族中的头脑之脆弱绝望。“这是强者的比赛，”达尔文写道，“我大概做不了啥了，只能满足于赞叹其他人对科学的贡献."
Darwin, of course, was wrong; his recurring fits didn’t prevent him from succeeding in science. Instead, the pain may actually have accelerated the pace of his research, allowing him to withdraw from the world and concentrate entirely on his work. His letters are filled with references to the salvation of study, which allowed him to temporarily escape his gloomy moods. “Work is the only thing which makes life endurable to me,” Darwin wrote and later remarked that it was his “sole enjoyment in life.”
当然达尔文错了。他的喜怒无常并不能阻止他在科学上的迈向成功的脚步。反倒是这种痛苦加快了他研究的步伐，让他从现实世界中抽身出来，全心全意的投入他的工作。他在信中讨论的全是研究给予他的救赎，这样他可以暂时的逃离开他的阴郁情绪。“工作是唯一能让我觉得生活尚可忍受的事情”，达尔文曾经这么写道，而后又强调“这是生活中唯一的乐趣”。
For Darwin, depression was a clarifying force, focusing the mind on its most essential problems. In his autobiography, he speculated on the purpose of such misery; his evolutionary theory was shadowed by his own life story. “Pain or suffering of any kind,” he wrote, “if long continued, causes depression and lessens the power of action, yet it is well adapted to make a creature guard itself against any great or sudden evil.” And so sorrow was explained away, because pleasure was not enough. Sometimes, Darwin wrote, it is the sadness that informs as it “leads an animal to pursue that course of action which is most beneficial.” The darkness was a kind of light.
对达尔文来说，抑郁是一个澄清视角的力量，使他专注于最重要的事情。在他的自传中，他对这种悲惨境遇的目的做了推测；他的进化论被他自己的生活蒙上了阴影。“任何形式的苦痛或者折磨，”他写到，“如果长期持续，会引起抑郁且减少行动力，但能使生物在应对任何巨大或者突然的恶果时候很好的适应保护自己。” 这样一来悲伤（的原因）就好理解了，因为愉悦不够多。达尔文写到，有时候，正是悲伤就像动物趋利避害的本能一样引导着我们做出最有利的行动。 黑暗是另一种光明。
The mystery of depression is not that it exists — the mind, like the flesh, is prone to malfunction. Instead, the paradox of depression has long been its prevalence. While most mental illnesses are extremely rare — schizophrenia, for example, is seen in less than 1 percent of the population — depression is everywhere, as inescapable as the common cold. Every year, approximately 7 percent of us will be afflicted to some degree by the awful mental state that William Styron described as a “gray drizzle of horror . . . a storm of murk.” Obsessed with our pain, we will retreat from everything. We will stop eating, unless we start eating too much. Sex will lose its appeal; sleep will become a frustrating pursuit. We will always be tired, even though we will do less and less. We will think a lot about death.
抑郁的谜团并非它的存在---思维如肉体一般，很容易出现故障。相反，抑郁症的悖论盛行已久。相较而言其他精神疾病的十分罕见---比如精神分裂症，约有小于总人口的1%的人患病---抑郁症则随处可见，就像无法摆脱的普通感冒一样。每年我们当中约有百分之七的人将会在某种程度上被William Styrone描述为“淅淅沥的灰色的恐怖之雨… 一场黑暗的暴风雨”的痛苦精神状况所折磨。深陷痛苦之中，我们逃避一切。我们要么不吃，要么暴饮暴食。我们对性失去兴趣；难以入眠。即便做的事情越来越少，我们仍旧总是感到疲倦。我们将会对死亡思考颇多。
The persistence of this affliction — and the fact that it seemed to be heritable — posed a serious challenge to Darwin’s new evolutionary theory. If depression was a disorder, then evolution had made a tragic mistake, allowing an illness that impedes reproduction — it leads people to stop having sex and consider suicide — to spread throughout the population. For some unknown reason, the modern human mind is tilted toward sadness and, as we’ve now come to think, needs drugs to rescue itself.
这一疾病的持续性以及可遗传性为达尔文的新进化论带来了严峻的挑战。如果抑郁是一种失调，则代表在进化时出现了一个灾难性的失误——即这种疾病阻碍了繁殖，使人们不再有性行为，也是一种形式上的自我灭亡。这一自杀性现象会遍及整个人口。在现代，由于某些未知的原因，这种思维现象被冠以悲伤之名，以至于我们现在觉得，需要用药物来拯救”悲伤“。
The alternative, of course, is that depression has a secret purpose and our medical interventions are making a bad situation even worse. Like a fever that helps the immune system fight off infection — increased body temperature sends white blood cells into overdrive — depression might be an unpleasant yet adaptive response to affliction. Maybe Darwin was right. We suffer — we suffer terribly — but we don’t suffer in vain.
当然，另一种观点是，抑郁症有其特别的意义，而我们的医疗干预措施正使其更加恶化。正如发烧是免疫系统对感染的对抗反应——通过提高体温，使白细胞开始战斗；抑郁症可能是人们对痛苦的一种适应性反应。因此，也许达尔文是正确的，人们承受的痛苦愈演愈烈，但这种忍受并非徒劳。
ANDY THOMSON IS a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia. He has a scruffy gray beard and steep cheekbones. When Thomson talks, he tends to close his eyes, as if he needs to concentrate on what he’s saying. But mostly what he does is listen: For the last 32 years, Thomson has been tending to his private practice in Charlottesville. “I tend to get the real hard cases,” Thomson told me recently. “A lot of the people I see have already tried multiple treatments. They arrive without much hope.” On one of the days I spent with Thomson earlier this winter, he checked his phone constantly for e-mail updates. A patient of his on “welfare watch” who was required to check in with him regularly had not done so, and Thomson was worried. “I’ve never gotten used to treating patients in mental pain,” he said. “Maybe it’s because every story is unique. You see one case of iron-deficiency anemia, you’ve seen them all. But the people who walk into my office are all hurting for a different reason.”
Andy Thomsn是维吉尼亚大学的精神科医生。他高颧骨、留着灰白胡子。他说话的时候喜欢闭着眼睛，让你觉得他非常专注。但是更多情况下，他只是倾听。32年来，Thomson都在Charlottesvlle经营自己的私人诊所。“我一直都试着接待真正困难的个案”，Thomson最近跟我说“很多人来之前都试过很多种办法，来的时候都觉得没什么希望”。刚入冬的某一天，我跟他在一起，他不时地在他手机上查邮件。应该定时跟他联系的一个病人没有跟他联系，Thomson很担心。”我从未适应如何去治疗有精神痛苦的病人。这大概是因为每个故事都是独一无二的。比如说你见一个儿童期缺铁贫血的病人，得这种病的病人可能都一样。但是走进我办公室的人们，每个人的伤痛都有不同原因。
In the late 1990s, Thomson became interested in evolutionary psychology, which tries to explain the features of the human mind in terms of natural selection. The starting premise of the field is that the brain has a vast evolutionary history, and that this history shapes human nature. We are not a blank slate but a byproduct of imperfect adaptations, stuck with a mind that was designed to meet the needs of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers on the African savanna. While the specifics of evolutionary psychology remain controversial — it’s never easy proving theories about the distant past — its underlying assumption is largely accepted by mainstream scientists. There is no longer much debate over whether evolution sculptured the fleshy machine inside our head. Instead, researchers have moved on to new questions like when and how this sculpturing happened and which of our mental traits are adaptations and which are accidents.
1990年末，Thomson开始对进化心理学——也就是以自然选择的理论来解释人类思想——产生兴趣。这一研究领域的前提是，大脑拥有着庞大的进化历史，这一历史也塑造着人类的本质。人类并不是一块空白的石板，而是不完美适应下产生的副产品，连带着为了适应更新世(Pleistocene)时期非洲疏林草原的狩猎者，而产生的一系列思维习惯。尽管进化心理学的许多细节仍有争议——因为证明远古时代的理论从不是易事，但其中的假设已被主流科学家广泛接纳。关于进化是否塑造了人们的脑袋中运转着的“人肉机器”（大脑）也不再是一个有争议的话题。研究者们已经继续新的研究话题，如这一塑造是从什么时候开始，又是如何开始的。以及人们的心理特征中哪一个属于适应作用的影响，哪一个又纯属意外。
In 2004, Thomson met Paul Andrews, an evolutionary psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University, who had long been interested in the depression paradox — why a disorder that’s so costly is also so common. Andrews has long dark brown hair and an aquiline nose. Before he begins to talk, he often writes down an outline of his answer on scratch paper. “This is a very delicate subject,” he says. “I don’t want to say something reckless.”
2004年 Thomson 见到 Paul Andrews, Virginian Commonwealth 大学的一位进化心理进化心理学家。Andrews 长期以来对抑郁这个迷感兴趣 --- 为什么这样一个严重的疾病却同时这么常见。Andrews有着长长的棕发和鹰钩鼻。他是个讲话之前总会在草稿纸上写个提纲的人。他回答到，“这是一个非常微妙的课题，我不想草率作答”。
Andrews and Thomson struck up an extended conversation on the evolutionary roots of depression. They began by focusing on the thought process that defines the disorder, which is known as rumination. (The verb is derived from the Latin word for “chewed over,” which describes the act of digestion in cattle, in which they swallow, regurgitate and then rechew their food.) In recent decades, psychiatry has come to see rumination as a dangerous mental habit, because it leads people to fixate on their flaws and problems, thus extending their negative moods. Consider “The Depressed Person,” a short story by David Foster Wallace, which chronicles a consciousness in the grip of the ruminative cycle. (Wallace struggled with severe depression for years before committing suicide in 2008.) The story is a long lament, a portrait of a mind hating itself, filled with sentences like this: “What terms might be used to describe such a solipsistic, self-consumed, bottomless emotional vacuum and sponge as she now appeared to herself to be?” The dark thoughts of “The Depressed Person” soon grow tedious and trying, but that’s precisely Wallace’s point. There is nothing profound about depressive rumination. There is just a recursive loop of woe.
Andrew和Thomson对于抑郁症在进化过程中的根源进行了深入的探讨。他们开始定义这种疾病的思考过程，也就是沉思。（这个动词来源于拉丁语的“反刍”，用来形容牛吞咽、吐出并且再次咀嚼食物的消化过程。）在过去几十年间，精神病学视沉思为一种危险的心理习惯，因为它引导人们过度关注他们的缺点和问题，于是扩展了负面情绪。比如David Foster Wallace的短篇小说《抑郁的人》【1】记录了意识到个人深陷于反复沉思中的状态。（Wallace在2008自杀之前一直深受重度抑郁症折磨。这个故事是一篇描述自我厌恶的长悼词，字里行间充斥着这样的文字：“用什么样的词汇才能形容她眼中这样唯我主义、自私自利、无底洞般抽空情感的自己呢?”抑郁的沉思一点儿也不深刻，它只不过是悲哀的无限循环。
The bleakness of this thought process helps explain why, according to the Yale psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, people with “ruminative tendencies” are more likely to become depressed. They’re also more likely to become unnerved by stressful events: for instance, Nolen-Hoeksema found that residents of San Francisco who self-identified as ruminators showed significantly more depressive symptoms after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. And then there are the cognitive deficits. Because rumination hijacks the stream of consciousness — we become exquisitely attentive to our pain — numerous studies have found that depressed subjects struggle to think about anything else, just like Wallace’s character. The end result is poor performance on tests for memory and executive function, especially when the task involves lots of information. (These deficits disappear when test subjects are first distracted from their depression and thus better able to focus on the exercise.) Such research has reinforced the view that rumination is a useless kind of pessimism, a perfect waste of mental energy.
根据耶鲁心理学家Susan Nolen-Hoeksema的研究，这么凄惨的思维过程可以解释有“沉思倾向”的人为什么更容易抑郁。这种人也更容易在压力大的情况下气馁。Hoeksema发现在旧金山，自觉是思考者的人在1989年洛马普列塔地震后有更多抑郁症状。这些人还有思维缺陷——沉思阻挡了意识流，加上人们对自己的痛苦感觉更强烈——无数研究发现抑郁的研究对象很难去想抑郁以外的事，这跟Wallace一模一样。结果就是记忆和执行能力下降，尤其是任务信息量较大的时候。（这些问题在受试者首次摆脱抑郁后会消失，他们因而能在训练中更好地集中注意力。）这类研究支持“沉思是没用的悲观且浪费精力”这一论点。
That, at least, was the scientific consensus when Andrews and Thomson began exploring the depression paradox. Their evolutionary perspective, however — they see the mind as a fine-tuned machine that is not prone to pointless programming bugs — led them to wonder if rumination had a purpose. They started with the observation that rumination was often a response to a specific psychological blow, like the death of a loved one or the loss of a job. (Darwin was plunged into a debilitating grief after his 10-year-old daughter, Annie, died following a bout of scarlet fever.) Although the D.S.M. manual, the diagnostic bible for psychiatrists, does not take such stressors into account when diagnosing depressive disorder — the exception is grief caused by bereavement, as long as the grief doesn’t last longer than two months — it’s clear that the problems of everyday life play a huge role in causing mental illness. “Of course, rumination is unpleasant,” Andrews says. “But it’s usually a response to something real, a real setback. It didn’t seem right that the brain would go haywire just when we need it most.”
［而Andrews和Thomson从进化的角度看，人的心智是精密的仪器，不会出现毫无意义的差错。于是他们觉得沉思还有其他用途。他们发现，沉思是对特定心理打击的反映，比如爱的人去世或者丢了工作。（达尔文在10岁的女儿安妮患猩红热去世后悲痛得奄奄一息）精神疾病诊断与统计手册这一精神病医生圣经并没有将这类刺激划入诊断抑郁症的条件，除非丧亲之痛持续了两个月以上——显然，日常生活中的矛盾对精神疾病也有很大影响。Andrews说：“沉思是挺不爽的，但它也是对真实、挫折的反映。只是当我们最需要清醒的思维时，它却乱套了。这就不太好了。”］
Imagine, for instance, a depression triggered by a bitter divorce. The ruminations might take the form of regret (“I should have been a better spouse”), recurring counterfactuals (“What if I hadn’t had my affair?”) and anxiety about the future (“How will the kids deal with it? Can I afford my alimony payments?”). While such thoughts reinforce the depression — that’s why therapists try to stop the ruminative cycle — Andrews and Thomson wondered if they might also help people prepare for bachelorhood or allow people to learn from their mistakes. “I started thinking about how, even if you are depressed for a few months, the depression might be worth it if it helps you better understand social relationships,” Andrews says. “Maybe you realize you need to be less rigid or more loving. Those are insights that can come out of depression, and they can be very valuable.”
比如说，想象一下因痛苦离婚而导致的抑郁症。沉思或许会以这些形式出现：后悔（“我应该做一个更好的配偶”），反复设想与现实相反的状况（“我要是没有出轨呢？”）或者对未来的焦虑（“孩子们会怎样调节?我有能力交付赡养费么？”“孩子们会怎么想？我是否付得起赡养费？”）的确这些念头会强化抑郁症—这正是为什么心理医生会试图停止这种循环的沉思—Andrews和Thomson好奇这些念头是否能同样能帮助人们更好准备进入单身生活或者帮助人们从自己的错误中学习。［Andrews和Thomson认为，治疗师也应该帮助人们为单身做准备或者让人们从错误中学习。］“我开始想，或许尽管你会郁闷好几个月，但它让你可以更好的了解社交关系从而使得抑郁症有价值。［就算你已经抑郁了几个月，抑郁也会让你对人际关系有更深入的理解］”Andrews说，“也许你意识到自己应该不那么固执或者应该更加忠诚。这是由抑郁而得出的领悟，它们可能是十分珍贵的。”
This radical idea — the scientists were suggesting that depressive disorder came with a net mental benefit — has a long intellectual history. Aristotle was there first, stating in the fourth century B.C. “that all men who have attained excellence in philosophy, in poetry, in art and in politics, even Socrates and Plato, had a melancholic habitus; indeed some suffered even from melancholic disease.” This belief was revived during the Renaissance, leading Milton to exclaim, in his poem “Il Penseroso”: “Hail divinest Melancholy/Whose saintly visage is too bright/To hit the sense of human sight.” The Romantic poets took the veneration of sadness to its logical extreme and described suffering as a prerequisite for the literary life. As Keats wrote, “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”
这两位科学家认为，伴随抑郁症而来的，是精神的提升。这个激进的观点在知识史上颇有渊源。亚里士多德在公元前4世纪就第一个曰过：“一切在哲学、诗歌、艺术、政治领域成绩卓著的人，即使苏格拉底和柏拉图也不例外，都是忧郁的常客；一些人甚至受到抑郁症的折磨。”这一观点在文艺复兴时期再度兴起，让弥尔顿在《沉思者》中呐喊：“赞美你！至为神圣的忧郁/你圣洁的容颜太过灿烂/灼伤了凡人的视觉”。浪漫主义时期的诗人们将对悲伤的崇敬推向极致。并将经受苦难视为文学生涯的先决条件。正如济慈所言：“你难道看不出一个充满痛苦的世界有多么重要？苦难能培育智慧，赋予它灵魂。”
But Andrews and Thomson weren’t interested in ancient aphorisms or poetic apologias. Their daunting challenge was to show how rumination might lead to improved outcomes, especially when it comes to solving life’s most difficult dilemmas. Their first speculations focused on the core features of depression, like the inability of depressed subjects to experience pleasure or their lack of interest in food, sex and social interactions. According to Andrews and Thomson, these awful symptoms came with a productive side effect, because they reduced the possibility of becoming distracted from the pressing problem.
但是 Andrews 和 Thomson 对古老的格言警句或诗歌辩解并不感兴趣。他们真正面临的挑战是证明沉思所带来的更好的结果，尤其在解决生活中的重大难题时。他们第一个假设集中在抑郁症的核心特征，比如抑郁症患者无法体验愉悦，或者他们对食物、性、以及社交的缺乏兴趣。［比如抑郁者对食物、性和人际交往都没有兴趣也无法从中得到快乐。］按照 Andrews 和 Thomson 的说法，这些糟糕的病征也有着有益的副作用，因为这些症状使患者不必面对其他迫切问题。
The capacity for intense focus, they note, relies in large part on a brain area called the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), which is located a few inches behind the forehead. While this area has been associated with a wide variety of mental talents, like conceptual knowledge and verb conjugation, it seems to be especially important for maintaining attention. Experiments show that neurons in the VLPFC must fire continuously to keep us on task so that we don’t become sidetracked by irrelevant information. Furthermore, deficits in the VLPFC have been associated with attention-deficit disorder.
注意力的高度集中，他们提到，大部分需要依靠大脑的一个叫做左腹外侧前额叶（VLPFC)的区域。它在额头后方几英寸的位置。虽然这个区域与许多心智才能-如理性认知和动词连配-有关，它对于保持注意力似乎也十分重要。研究显示，VLPFC的神经元必须持续保持活跃，以使我们专注于当前的任务，而不被其他不相关的信息所分心。另外，VLPFC区域的损坏也被认为与多动症有关。
Several studies found an increase in brain activity (as measured indirectly by blood flow) in the VLPFC of depressed patients. Most recently, a paper to be published next month by neuroscientists in China found a spike in “functional connectivity” between the lateral prefrontal cortex and other parts of the brain in depressed patients, with more severe depressions leading to more prefrontal activity. One explanation for this finding is that the hyperactive VLPFC underlies rumination, allowing people to stay focused on their problem. (Andrews and Thomson argue that this relentless fixation also explains the cognitive deficits of depressed subjects, as they are too busy thinking about their real-life problems to bother with an artificial lab exercise; their VLPFC can’t be bothered to care.) Human attention is a scarce resource — the neural effects of depression make sure the resource is efficiently allocated.
一些研究表明，抑郁症病人的左腹外侧前额叶（VLPFC）大脑活动增加（间接通过测量血流量得知）。最近，即将在下月发表的一篇论文中，中国的神经科学家们在抑郁症病人的大脑中找到了一种在侧前额叶皮层和大脑其他部分具有“功能性连接”的脉冲.（好难顺这个句子...）抑郁症病情越严重，大脑前额叶皮层的活动越活跃。一个可能的解释为过分活跃的VLPFC区域是沉思活动的基础，能让人们专注于他们的问题（Andrew和Thompson认为，这项不停止的修正也解释了抑郁症病人的认知障碍，因为他们太过于专注思考他们现实生活中的问题，而不屑于实验室里的artificial excercise; VLPFC根本不屑于关注这些问题。) 人类的注意力是一项稀有资源--抑郁症的神经效应确保这些资源可以得到有效分配。
But the reliance on the VLPFC doesn’t just lead us to fixate on our depressing situation; it also leads to an extremely analytical style of thinking. That’s because rumination is largely rooted in working memory, a kind of mental scratchpad that allows us to “work” with all the information stuck in consciousness. When people rely on working memory — and it doesn’t matter if they’re doing long division or contemplating a relationship gone wrong — they tend to think in a more deliberate fashion, breaking down their complex problems into their simpler parts.
但是，对左腹外侧前额叶（VLPFC）的依赖并不仅仅使我们沉浸于抑郁状态，它也会产生一种极具分析性的思维方式。这是由于沉思主要源自工作记忆，也即一种便笺式精神存储器，可使我们利用陷入知觉之中的所有信息来进行工作。无论是在做长除法运算或是沉思一段槽糕的感情经历,这都不太重要，当人们依赖于工作记忆时，他们就会以一种更加审慎的方式来进行思考，会把问题化繁为简。
The bad news is that this deliberate thought process is slow, tiresome and prone to distraction; the prefrontal cortex soon grows exhausted and gives out. Andrews and Thomson see depression as a way of bolstering our feeble analytical skills, making it easier to pay continuous attention to a difficult dilemma. The downcast mood and activation of the VLPFC are part of a “coordinated system” that, Andrews and Thomson say, exists “for the specific purpose of effectively analyzing the complex life problem that triggered the depression.” If depression didn’t exist — if we didn’t react to stress and trauma with endless ruminations — then we would be less likely to solve our predicaments. Wisdom isn’t cheap, and we pay for it with pain.
一个并不好的消息是这种“刻意”的思维过程十分缓慢，累人且注意力容易被分散，前额皮质很容易疲惫不堪。Anderw和Thomson把抑郁看作加强我们衰弱的分析能力的一种方式，让我们更容易将持续的注意力投向进退两难的困境。据Andrew和Thomson称，沮丧情绪和左腹外侧前额叶（VLPFC）是协调系统的一部分，其存在目的在于“有效分析会引起抑郁的的复杂生活问题”。如果抑郁不存在，如果我们不应对压力和精神创伤并反复深思，我们很可能无法解决我们的困境。智慧并不是廉价的，我们需要付出或许痛苦的代价。
Consider a young professor on tenure track who was treated by Thomson. The patient was having difficulties with his academic department. “This guy was used to success coming easy, but now it wasn’t,” Thomson says. “I made it clear that I thought he’d need some time to figure out his next step. His problem was like a splinter, and the pain wouldn’t go away until the splinter was removed.” Should the patient leave the department? Should he leave academia? Or should he try to resolve the disagreement? Over the next several weeks, Thomson helped the patient analyze his situation and carefully think through the alternatives. “We took it one variable at a time,” Thomson says. “And it eventually became clear to him that the departmental issues couldn’t be fixed. He needed to leave. Once he came to that conclusion, he started feeling better.”
比如Thomson在治疗一个有着终身教职的年轻教授。这个病人在自己的院系里面遇到些困难。“这个人以前一直顺风顺水，但现在遇到问题了，”Thomson说，“我很清楚地告诉他，他需要给自己些时间，想想自己接下来怎么办。他的问题就像个扎进指头的小碎片，不拿出来，就一直疼“。这个病人是应该离开这个院系？离开学术圈？或者他应该努力去解决争端？在接下来的几周内，Thomson帮助这个来访者分析他的状况，仔细地考虑各种选择。”我们每次解决一个问题“Thomson说，”而后慢慢他意识到院系的问题是无法解决的。他应该离开。一旦他有个定论，他就开始觉得好一些“。
The publication of Andrews and Thomson’s 36,000-word paper in the July 2009 issue of Psychological Review had a polarizing effect on the field. While some researchers, like Jerome Wakefield, a professor at New York University who specializes in the conceptual foundations of clinical theory, greeted the paper as “an extremely important first step toward the re-evaluation of depression,” other psychiatrists regarded it as little more than irresponsible speculation, a justification for human suffering. Peter Kramer, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University, describes the paper as “a ladder with a series of weak rungs.” Kramer has long defended the use of antidepressants — his landmark work, “Listening to Prozac,” chronicled the profound improvements of patients taking the drugs — and criticized those who romanticized depression, which he compares to the glamorization of tuberculosis in the late 19th century. In a series of e-mail messages to me, Kramer suggested that Andrews and Thomson neglect the variants of depression that don’t fit their evolutionary theory. “This study says nothing about chronic depression and the sort of self-hating, paralyzing, hopeless, circular rumination it inspires,” Kramer wrote. And what about post-stroke depression? Late-life depression? Extreme depressive condition? Kramer argues that there’s a clear category difference between a healthy response to social stressors and the response of people with depressive disorder. “Depression is not really like sadness,” Kramer has written. “It’s more an oppressive flattening of feeling.”
Andrews 和Thomson长达36000字的相关论文，2009年7月发表于Psychological Review（译者注：心理学界影响力极大的期刊）之后，在该领域内激起了两极分化的反响。一些科学家赞同这篇论文，认为“在抑郁症重新评价上迈出了意义重大的第一步”，例如纽约大学的Jerome Wakefield教授，他致力于临床理论的概念构建；其他精神病学家则认为这个理论比不负责任的猜测好不到哪去，只是在洗白人类的苦难。Peter Kramer，布朗大学的精神病学和人类行为学教授，将这篇论文比作“由一堆不怎么牢靠的木板搭起的梯子”。Kramer一直是抗抑郁药物疗效的捍卫者——他的代表作《聆听百忧解》记述的正是服用该药物的患者所经历的深刻变化 ，他批评那些将抑郁症浪漫化的倾向，认为这种做法无异于19世纪末对肺结核的美化。在发给我的一系列电子邮件中，Kramer认为Andrew 和Thomson忽略了那些与其革命性理论不相符的抑郁类型。“这项研究完全没有提到慢性抑郁症，和由此引发的自我憎恨、瘫痪、无助和循环反复思考。”Kramer这样写道。此外，中风后抑郁，老年抑郁症，还有极端抑郁的情形呢？Kramer主张，面对社会压力源，健康的反应和抑郁症患者的反应属于两个截然不同的范畴。“抑郁和悲伤不太一样，”Kramer写道，“抑郁更像是一片压迫式的扁平情感。
Even scientists who are sympathetic to what Andrews and Thomson call the “analytic-rumination hypothesis” remain critical of its details. Ed Hagen, an anthropologist at Washington State University who is working on a book with Andrews, says that while the analytic-rumination hypothesis has persuaded him that some depressive symptoms might improve problem-solving skills, he remains unconvinced that it is a sufficient explanation for depression. “Individuals with major depression often don’t groom, bathe and sometimes don’t even use the toilet,” Hagen says. They also significantly “reduce investment in child care,” which could have detrimental effects on the survival of offspring. The steep fitness costs of these behaviors, Hagen says, would not be offset by “more uninterrupted time to think.”
即使那些赞同Andrews和Thomson的“分析式沉思假说”说法的科学家们，对这个假说的细节仍保留批判的态度。目前跟Andrews合作写书的来自华盛顿大学的人类学家Ed Hagen表示，虽然“分析式沉思假说”让他认同某些抑郁症状可能提高解决问题的能力，但他仍不认为这能完全解释抑郁症。“有严重抑郁症的病人常常不修边幅，无视个人卫生，有时甚至不用洗手间，”Hagen说。他们经常大幅度地“削减花费在照顾孩子上的投资”，而这往往严重威胁到下一代的生存。这些行为带来的严重健康后果，Hagen说，不会被更多“不被打断的沉思”抵消。
Other scientists, including Randolph Nesse at the University of Michigan, say that complex psychiatric disorders like depression rarely have simple evolutionary explanations. In fact, the analytic-rumination hypothesis is merely the latest attempt to explain the prevalence of depression. There is, for example, the “plea for help” theory, which suggests that depression is a way of eliciting assistance from loved ones. There’s also the “signal of defeat” hypothesis, which argues that feelings of despair after a loss in social status help prevent unnecessary attacks; we’re too busy sulking to fight back. And then there’s “depressive realism”: several studies have found that people with depression have a more accurate view of reality and are better at predicting future outcomes. While each of these speculations has scientific support, none are sufficient to explain an illness that afflicts so many people. The moral, Nesse says, is that sadness, like happiness, has many functions.
其他科学家们，包括密歇根大学的Randolph Nesse，认为复杂的精神问题像是抑郁[像抑郁这样复杂的精神问题]很少有单纯而革命性的解释。事实上，分析式沉思（analytic-rumination）的理论仅仅是最新的较为被接受的关于抑郁的解释。其他的理论比如说，“乞求帮助”的理论，提出抑郁是一种从亲爱的人博得协助的方式。同时，“防御信号”理论提出，社会地位的下降之后的绝望情绪帮助防御不必要的打击。我们忙于生气的同时便无暇反击。关于“抑郁现实主义”：一些研究发现抑郁的人有更准确的现实判断并且预测未来的准确性更高。即使每一个理论的提出都有科学依据，目前并无一者能够完全解释这种困扰无数人的疾病。其意义，Nesse称，沮丧和开心有许多（不为人知的）功能。[在Nesse看来其意义在于，如同快乐一样，悲伤也有许多功能。]
Although Nesse says he admires the analytic-rumination hypothesis, he adds that it fails to capture the heterogeneity of depressive disorder. Andrews and Thomson compare depression to a fever helping to fight off infection, but Nesse says a more accurate metaphor is chronic pain, which can arise for innumerable reasons. “Sometimes, the pain is going to have an organic source,” he says. “Maybe you’ve slipped a disc or pinched a nerve, in which case you’ve got to solve that underlying problem. But much of the time there is no origin for the pain. The pain itself is the dysfunction.”
尽管Nesse表示他很欣赏分析沉思设想，但他也表示表现抑郁症多样性是不可能的。Andrews和Thomson将抑郁和击感染的发烧进行对比，但Nesses说更准确的形容应该是慢性疼痛。有时候，疼痛源自器官，”他说，“也可能是椎间盘突出或是神经受到积压，这些情况下你能应对问题的根源，但更多情况是没有来源的疼痛，疼痛本身就是功能障碍。”
Andrews and Thomson respond to such criticisms by acknowledging that depression is a vast continuum, a catch-all term for a spectrum of symptoms. While the analytic-rumination hypothesis might explain those patients reacting to an “acute stressor,” it can’t account for those whose suffering has no discernible cause or whose sadness refuses to lift for years at a time. “To say that depression can be useful doesn’t mean it’s always going to be useful,” Thomson says. “Sometimes, the symptoms can spiral out of control. The problem, though, is that as a society, we’ve come to see depression as something that must always be avoided or medicated away. We’ve been so eager to remove the stigma from depression that we’ve ended up stigmatizing sadness.”
Andrews and Thomson 在回应批评中承认抑郁是漫长的连续体，是个包罗万象的症状。分析理论式（ analytic-rumination hypothesis）或许解释了这些有“紧张性刺激”的患者，然而并不能解释那些并无明显原因或者那些悲伤情绪几年都没有好转的患者。抑郁可以是有用的,但并不意味着它总是有用的。有时症状会急剧失控。问题是，人们把抑郁当作是必须避免或必须治疗的病。我们很想消除这个根深蒂固的想法，并已经不再侮蔑悲哀了。
For Thomson, this new theory of depression has directly affected his medical practice. “That’s the litmus test for me,” he says. “Do these ideas help me treat my patients better?” In recent years, Thomson has cut back on antidepressant prescriptions, because, he says, he now believes that the drugs can sometimes interfere with genuine recovery, making it harder for people to resolve their social dilemmas. “I remember one patient who came in and said she needed to reduce her dosage,” he says. “I asked her if the antidepressants were working, and she said something I’ll never forget. ‘Yes, they’re working great,’ she told me. ‘I feel so much better. But I’m still married to the same alcoholic son of a bitch. It’s just now he’s tolerable.’ ”
对Thomson来说，抑郁症的新理论已经对他的医学实践产生了直接影响，“那对我来说只是个石蕊测试罢了，”他说。“那些新想法有帮助我更好的医治我的病人吗？”最近这些年，Thomson已经减少了抗抑郁剂的药方，因为他觉得药物可能会妨碍基因的自身复原，让人们更难解决他们的社交困境。“我记得一个病人到我办公室来说她需要减少她的药物剂量，”他说，“我告诉她如果抗抑郁剂能起作用就没有必要，但是她说有一些事她永远不可能忘记就算服药也不能。‘是的，那药很有用，’她这样告诉我告诉我，‘我感觉好多了，但是我的丈夫仍然是个混蛋，但是现在我至少能够容忍他。’”
The point is the woman was depressed for a reason; her pain was about something. While the drugs made her feel better, no real progress was ever made. Thomson’s skepticism about antidepressants is bolstered by recent studies questioning their benefits, at least for patients with moderate depression. Consider a 2005 paper led by Steven Hollon, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University: he found that people on antidepressants had a 76 percent chance of relapse within a year when the drugs were discontinued. In contrast, patients given a form of cognitive talk therapy had a relapse rate of 31 percent. And Hollon’s data aren’t unusual: several studies found that patients treated with medication were approximately twice as likely to relapse as patients treated with cognitive behavior therapy. “The high relapse rate suggests that the drugs aren’t really solving anything,” Thomson says. “In fact, they seem to be interfering with the solution, so that patients are discouraged from dealing with their problems. We end up having to keep people on the drugs forever. It was as if these people have a bodily infection, and modern psychiatry is just treating their fever.”
重点是女人感到沮丧的原因是源于某些令她感到痛苦的事情。在药物让她感觉到好一些的同时，病情并没有真正的进展。Thomson对抗抑郁药的怀疑在最近一些质疑药物对于至少中度抑郁症患者益处的研究中得到支持。范德堡大学心理学家Hollon在其2005年的论文中提到：他发现停止服药的抑郁症患者有76%的可能在一年内复发，相反，接受认知谈话疗法的患者，复发率为31%。Hollon的数据并不是唯一的：一些研究发现用使用药物治疗的患者病情复发率是接受认知行为疗法患者的近两倍。“高复发率表明药物未能解决任何问题”Thomson说道。“事实上，它们似乎还干扰了解决方案，导致患者对他们难题的解决感到失望。这些人终身需要服药，这就好像这些人的病情是身体感染，而现在精神病学只能治疗他们的高烧。”
Thomson describes a college student who was referred to his practice. “It was clear that this patient was in a lot of pain,” Thomson says. “He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t study. He had some family issues” — his parents were recently divorced — “and his father was exerting a tremendous amount of pressure on him to go to graduate school. Because he’s got a family history of depression, the standard of care would be to put him on drugs right away. And a few years ago, that’s what I would have done.”
Thomson 讲述了一个被转介到他诊所的大学生。“很明显,这个病人是很痛苦,” Thomson说，“他无法入睡,无法学习。他有一些家庭问题”——他的父母最近离婚了——”他父亲让他去读研究生，给他很大的压力。因为他有抑郁症家族史,标准的治疗会让他马上服药。而在几年前,我会这样做的。”
Instead, Thomson was determined to help the student solve his problem. “What you’re trying to do is speed along the rumination process,” Thomson says. “Once you show people the dilemma they need to solve, they almost always start feeling better.” He cites as evidence a recent study that found “expressive writing” — asking depressed subjects to write essays about their feelings — led to significantly shorter depressive episodes. The reason, Thomson suggests, is that writing is a form of thinking, which enhances our natural problem-solving abilities. “This doesn’t mean there’s some miracle cure,” he says. “In most cases, the recovery period is going to be long and difficult. And that’s what I told this young student. I said: ‘I know you’re hurting. I know these problems seem impossible. But they’re not. And I can help you solve them.’ ”
Thomson决定帮助这个学生解决困难。“你要做的是迅速完成沉思过程，”Thomas说，“一旦你告诉人们需要解决的问题，他们就差不多开始好转了。”他引用最近表达性书写的研究——让抑郁者就自己的感受写篇文章，显著缩短了抑郁发作时间。Thomson认为，写作是一种提高自然解决问题能力的思考。“这并不意味着这是什么灵丹妙药,"他说，“在很多案例中，治愈阶段又难又长，我告诉那个学生：‘我知道你很受伤，我知道这些问题看似没法解决，但其实不是，我可以帮你’。”
IT’S TOO SOON to judge the analytic-rumination hypothesis. Nobody knows if depression is an adaptation or if Andrews and Thomson have merely spun another “Just So” story, a clever evolutionary tale that lacks direct evidence. Nevertheless, their speculation is part of a larger scientific re-evaluation of negative moods, which have long been seen as emotional states to avoid. The dismissal of sadness and its synonyms is perhaps best exemplified by the rise of positive psychology, a scientific field devoted to the pursuit of happiness. In recent years, a number of positive psychologists have written popular self-help books, like “The How of Happiness” and “Authentic Happiness,” that try to outline the scientific principles behind “lasting fulfillment” and “getting the life we want.”
评价沉思分析猜想还为时过早。没人知道抑郁症是不是适应性的，或Andrews和Thomson仅仅是扯了一个符合进化论但缺乏证据只能自圆其说的故事。然而，他们的猜想符合大部分对负面情绪的评估——负面情绪是情感上的回避。甩掉悲哀及其同义词 可以看作是积极心理学兴起的典例。积极心理学致力于追求快乐。近几年，好些积极心理学家写了很多畅销自助书籍，比如《快乐方法论》和《真正的快乐》，都在简述“持久的满足”、“过自己想要的生活”背后的科学原理。
The new research on negative moods, however, suggests that sadness comes with its own set of benefits and that even our most unpleasant feelings serve an important purpose. Joe Forgas, a social psychologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia, has repeatedly demonstrated in experiments that negative moods lead to better decisions in complex situations. The reason, Forgas suggests, is rooted in the intertwined nature of mood and cognition: sadness promotes “information-processing strategies best suited to dealing with more-demanding situations.” This helps explain why test subjects who are melancholy — Forgas induces the mood with a short film about death and cancer — are better at judging the accuracy of rumors and recalling past events; they’re also much less likely to stereotype strangers.
负面情感的新研究表示，悲哀也有一系列好处，就是最难过的情绪也有重要的用途。澳大利亚新南威尔士大学的社会心理学家Joe Forgas反复阐述在复杂情况中，负面情感使被试作出更好的抉择。Forgas认为，其根源在于情感与认知相纠结的本质。悲哀促进“最佳多需求信息处理的策略”。这也可以解释为什么看完死亡与癌症短片的忧郁的被试能更准确地判断谣言，回想起过去的事，对陌生人也没有很多成见。
Last year Forgas ventured beyond the lab and began conducting studies in a small stationery store in suburban Sydney, Australia. The experiment itself was simple: Forgas placed a variety of trinkets, like toy soldiers, plastic animals and miniature cars, near the checkout counter. As shoppers exited, Forgas tested their memory, asking them to list as many of the items as possible. To control for the effect of mood, Forgas conducted the survey on gray, rainy days — he accentuated the weather by playing Verdi’s “Requiem” — and on sunny days, using a soundtrack of Gilbert and Sullivan. The results were clear: shoppers in the “low mood” condition remembered nearly four times as many of the trinkets. The wet weather made them sad, and their sadness made them more aware and attentive.
去年Forgas冒险走出实验室，在悉尼城郊一家小文具用品店进行了一项研究。实验很简单。Forgas在收款台摆了些小装饰品，像玩具兵，塑料动物，微型小车之类的。当购物者兴奋时， Forgas测试他们的记忆，让他们尽可能列举有几样摆设。为了控制情绪，Forgas在阴雨天做这个调查。他播放威尔第的《安魂曲》、Gilbert and Sullivan的电影原声来强化天气的影响。结果很明显，情绪不好的购物者记住了四倍多的摆件。潮湿的天气使他们悲哀，而悲哀让他们更细心留意。
The enhancement of these mental skills might also explain the striking correlation between creative production and depressive disorders. In a survey led by the neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen, 30 writers from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop were interviewed about their mental history. Eighty percent of the writers met the formal diagnostic criteria for some form of depression. A similar theme emerged from biographical studies of British writers and artists by Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, who found that successful individuals were eight times as likely as people in the general population to suffer from major depressive illness.
这些心智技能的提升也许也解释了创造性产出和抑郁症之间的惊人联系.在由神经学家Nancy Andreasen所领导的一项调查中,采访了来自爱荷华作家工作坊的30位作者的心路历程.他们中的80%都达到了某类正规抑郁症的诊断标准.在Johns Hopkins大学的精神病学教授Kay Redfield对英国作家和艺术家个人简历的研究中也发现了相似的情况,即成功人士患抑郁症的可能是一般大众的八倍.
Why is mental illness so closely associated with creativity? Andreasen argues that depression is intertwined with a “cognitive style” that makes people more likely to produce successful works of art. In the creative process, Andreasen says, “one of the most important qualities is persistence.” Based on the Iowa sample, Andreasen found that “successful writers are like prizefighters who keep on getting hit but won’t go down. They’ll stick with it until it’s right.” While Andreasen acknowledges the burden of mental illness — she quotes Robert Lowell on depression not being a “gift of the Muse” and describes his reliance on lithium to escape the pain — she argues that many forms of creativity benefit from the relentless focus it makes possible. “Unfortunately, this type of thinking is often inseparable from the suffering,” she says. “If you’re at the cutting edge, then you’re going to bleed.”
为什么心理疾病和创造力这么息息相关？Andreasen 认为与抑郁紧密结合的一种“思维方式”，能够让人们更有可能创作出成功的艺术作品。在创造过程中，Andreasen 说，“最重要的能力是坚持。”基于Iowa 的样本，Andreasen 发现 “成功的作家就像是永远打不垮的斗士。他们坚持到把活儿做好。”虽然 Andreasen 承认心理疾病的重负 -- 她引用 Robert Lowell 对抑郁症的描述 “不是缪斯的礼物” 并形容他是如何依靠锂（译者注：是一种金属，也是治疗抑郁的药物）来逃离痛苦 -- 她据理力争说很多创造力得益于抑郁带来的极大的注意力集中。“很遗憾，这种形式的思考和痛苦无法分离”，她说，“如果你在领域的前沿，你不可避免要受伤。”
And then there’s the virtue of self-loathing, which is one of the symptoms of depression. When people are stuck in the ruminative spiral, their achievements become invisible; the mind is only interested in what has gone wrong. While this condition is typically linked to withdrawal and silence — people become unwilling to communicate — there’s some suggestive evidence that states of unhappiness can actually improve our expressive abilities. Forgas said he has found that sadness correlates with clearer and more compelling sentences, and that negative moods “promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style.” Because we’re more critical of what we’re writing, we produce more refined prose, the sentences polished by our angst. As Roland Barthes observed, “A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.”
再来是自我厌恶的优点,这也是抑郁的一个征兆.当人们陷在螺旋形思维模式中时,他们就会无视自己的成就;心心念念的只是到底哪儿出了差错.虽然这种情况一般与回避和沉默紧紧相连--人们开始失去交流的欲望--但有些具有启发性的证据表明不快乐的状态实际上会提升我们自我表达的能力.Forgas说他发现悲伤与那些表达的更加清晰更具说服力的句子相关联,并且负面情绪"促成了一个更具体,更宽松并且最终更加成功有效的沟通方式."因为我们对自己所写的东西要求更为严格,我们就会写出更为精致的散文,字句会在我们的焦虑下被打磨抛光.正如Roland Barthes指出,"觉得写作是一个难题的作者才是个具有创造力的作者."
This line of research led Andrews to conduct his own experiment, as he sought to better understand the link between negative mood and improved analytical abilities. He gave 115 undergraduates an abstract-reasoning test known as Raven’s Progressive Matrices, which requires subjects to identify a missing segment in a larger pattern. (Performance on the task strongly predicts general intelligence.) The first thing Andrews found was that nondepressed students showed an increase in “depressed affect” after taking the test. In other words, the mere presence of a challenging problem — even an abstract puzzle — induced a kind of attentive trance, which led to feelings of sadness. It doesn’t matter if we’re working on a mathematical equation or working through a broken heart: the anatomy of focus is inseparable from the anatomy of melancholy. This suggests that depressive disorder is an extreme form of an ordinary thought process, part of the dismal machinery that draws us toward our problems, like a magnet to metal.
这个方向上的研究让Andrews开始进行自己的实验,他试图更好的去了解消极情绪和分析能力提升之间的联系.他给115个本科生进行了被称为瑞文标准推理测验(Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices 简称 SPM)的抽象推理测试,它需要被试辨别一个大的图形中缺失的部分是哪块.(在任务中的表现很好的反应了智力水平.)Andrews首先发现的是没有抑郁症的学生在参加测试后反而抑郁水平有所升高.换句话说,仅仅是一个有挑战性的问题--甚至是个抽象的难题--会引导出细微的恍惚,从而感觉到悲伤.不管是我们正在解决一个数学等式或者心力憔悴都不会有什么关系:要分解注意力是离不开对惆怅的分析的.这表明抑郁症是一种普通的思维过程的某种极端形式,是将我们引导到我们自身问题的某种低落的情绪机制的一部份,就像磁铁对金属的吸引.
But is that closeness effective? Does the despondency help us solve anything? Andrews found a significant correlation between depressed affect and individual performance on the intelligence test, at least once the subjects were distracted from their pain: lower moods were associated with higher scores. “The results were clear,” Andrews says. “Depressed affect made people think better.” The challenge, of course, is persuading people to accept their misery, to embrace the tonic of despair. To say that depression has a purpose or that sadness makes us smarter says nothing about its awfulness. A fever, after all, might have benefits, but we still take pills to make it go away. This is the paradox of evolution: even if our pain is useful, the urge to escape from the pain remains the most powerful instinct of all.
但是,这种相似是否真的有效？垂头丧气能帮我们解决任何问题么?Andrews发现抑郁情感和个人在智力测验上的表现有着显著相关的,至少一旦当被试从痛苦中解脱出来就会这样:情绪低落与高分相互联系.Andrews说:"结果非常明显,抑郁情感让人们能够更好的思考"当然,所面临的挑战是如何劝说人们接受他们的痛苦,去拥抱绝望带来的激励.如果说抑郁或者悲伤的目的是让我们更加聪敏那就无视了它的糟糕之处.毕竟,发烧也许会有益处,但我们还是会服药来赶走病魔.这就是进化的矛盾之处:即使我们的痛苦是有用的,从中逃离的冲动仍是最强大的本能.
Jonah Lehrer is the author of “How We Decide” and of the blog The Frontal Cortex. This is his first article for the magazine.
Jonah Lehrer是"我们如何决策"和博客"前额叶皮层"的作者.这是他为杂志所作的第一篇文章.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: March 14, 2010
An article on Feb. 28 about the benefits of depression misstated the name of a university in Australia where studies have been done on the subject. It is the University of New South Wales, not South Wales.
本文已根据以下做出纠正:
纠正:2010年3月14日
2月28日关于抑郁症的好处的文章弄错了被试所在的一所澳大利亚大学的名称.该大学是新南威尔士大学,而不是南威尔士大学.
注：【1】@小魔障 提供扩展阅读：文中提到的David Wallace的the depressed person 的PDF版 http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-01-0059425.pdf
[2] Nemo （http://www.douban.com/people/65872310/）今天提到关于本文中rumination的翻译：
“今天上课突然发现心理学对rumination有单独的定义。根据wiki，rumination指 the compulsively focused attention on the symptoms of one's distress, and on its possible causes and consequences, as opposed to its solutions. 特点为只想过去带有负面情感的事儿。我记得翻译里好像说的是“沉思”来着，对照中文的话，貌似不太准确。 ”
收录于：协同翻译系列文章(Let's Have Fun!)
简单心理的日记 ( 全部 )
推荐这篇日记的豆列 ( 全部 )
- 协同翻译系列文章(Let's Have Fun!) (简里里)
- 抑郁症 (风归时)
- Anxiety & Depression (viceversa)
- 协同翻译 (Joy-橘子)
- 似乎會有用的技能 (西樓)
感谢这篇文章的翻译者们！
前几天看了这篇文章，当时觉得没什么，结果越想越觉得有用和正确——帮助我勇敢正视负面情绪啦~\(≧▽≦)/~
感谢翻译者们
但是这一段翻译得不太对“I asked her if the antidepressants were working, and she said something I’ll never forget. ‘Yes, they’re working great,’ she told me. ‘I feel so much better. But I’m still married to the same alcoholic son of a bitch. It’s just now he’s tolerable.’ ”
应该是：
我问她抗抑郁药是否有效，她的回答令我永生难忘。“是的，它们效果很棒”，她对我说，“我觉得好太多了。但是我还是那个酗酒的狗娘养的人的老婆，只是现在觉得他可以容忍了。”
> 我来回应