Jonathan Rottenberg > Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How will we better contain depression? Expect no magic pill. One lesson learned from treating chronic pain is that it is tough to override responses that are hardwired into the body and mind. Instead, we must follow the economy of mood where it leads, attending to the sources that bring so many into low mood states—think routines that feature too much work and too little sleep. We need broader mood literacy and an awareness of tools that interrupt low mood states before they morph into longer and more severe ones. These tools include altering how we think, the events around us, our relationships, and conditions in our bodies (by exercise, medication, or diet).”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“I have discussed how the goal of feeling happy is unusual; its not like other goals such as learning to bake a pizza, for which the desire to achieve is half the battle and steady application is the rest. Pressing harder on unfulfilled and unrealistic goals for happiness can paradoxically deepen depression.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“A chimpanzee is capable of feeling ad, but only a human being can feel bad about feeling bad.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“Interestingly, it is the variety of the stressors in the chronic stress routine that really matters. When subjected to simpler versions of the routine, with just one or two stressors, the rats habituate, or adapt, to the stress.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“The Tail Suspension Test, or “Tail Test” for short, is one such test. Mice are suspended upside down by their tails, usually for six minutes. The amount of time the mouse struggles and the force and direction with which it pulls are measured. The Tail Test is based on the observation that when placed in an inescapable stressful situation, rodents will eventually develop an immobile posture after initial escape-oriented movements. The Tail Test demonstrates the mood system’s ability to demobilize effort, sometimes quite rapidly. The mouse has the goal of escaping from an uncomfortable (hemodynamic stress of blood rushing to the head) and highly unfamiliar situation of being hung by the tail. Yet it learns over time that its movements cannot effect escape. Its final immobile posture is the product of a mood system that is rapidly reducing effort in the context of an impossible goal.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

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

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

“Depressed people become unable to remember happy times, or times when they even had a normal mood. The very concept of a normal mood itself becomes alien. I’ve had more than one depressed participant offer me a pained smile during an interview when I asked, -When was the last time you felt like your usual self? – These are the disorientations of chronic depression.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“I have ovarian cancer and I have severe depression. I’m in five year remission now. When I had cancer, and when I was fighting that, I had flowers, I had people at my door. I had people cooking meals for me. I had people at work, you know rah rah, here we go. When I’m depressed, isolation, people don’t call, they don’t know what to say, they don’t know how to help, they don’t know to reach out.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

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

“The idea that low mood could have more than one function squares with the obvious fact that it is triggered reliably by very different situations. A partial list of triggers includes separation from the group, removal to an unfamiliar environment, the inability to escape from a stressful situation, death of a significant other,14 scarce food resources, prolonged bodily pain, and social defeat.15 In humans the value of low mood is put to the fullest test when people face serious situations in which immediate problems need to be carefully assessed. We might think of the groom who is left at the altar, the loyal employee who is suddenly fired from his job, or the death of a child. If we had to find a unifying function for low mood across these diverse situations, it would be that of an emotional cocoon, a space to pause and analyze what has gone wrong. In this mode, we will stop what we are doing, assess the situation, draw in others, and, if necessary, change course. Fantasizing about a world without low mood is a vain exercise. Low moods have existed in some form across human cultures for many thousands of years.16 One way to appreciate why these states have enduring value is to ponder what would happen if we had no capacity for them. Just as animals with no capacity for anxiety were gobbled up by predators long ago, without the capacity for sadness, we and other animals would probably commit rash acts and repeat costly mistakes. Physical pain teaches a child to avoid hot burners; psychic pain teaches us to navigate life’s rocky shoals with due caution.17”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“Arguing about the functions of mood can be challenging. Some hypothesized functions of mood play out over time and are nearly impossible to test decisively with a laboratory experiment. Take the hypotheses that (1) low mood helps people disengage from unattainable goals and (2) we end up better off as a result of letting go. Testing this hypothesized chain of events requires data about the real-world goals that people want to attain and the ability to measure people’s adjustment and well-being over the longer term. A nonexperimental study of adolescent girls in Canada did just this, collecting four waves of longitudinal data on the relationship between goals and depression over nineteen months. Consistent with the first hypothesis, those adolescents who had depressive symptoms reported a tendency to become more disengaged from goals over time. The stereotypical image of a disengaged adolescent sulking in her room with an iPod may not look like the process of rebuilding psychological health. Results were in fact consistent with the idea that letting go was a positive development: those adolescents who became more disengaged from goals ended up being better off, reporting lower levels of depression in the later assessments.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“We need broader mood literacy and an awareness of tools that interrupt low mood states before they morph into longer and more severe ones. These tools include altering how we think, the events around us, our relationships, and conditions in our bodies (by exercise, medication, or diet).”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“Culturally we have been taught that the prolonged struggle of a mouse or a man in an impossible situation is noble. Sisyphus pushes his rock up the hill only to have it roll back down. Lacking the data to prove that persistent behaviors are always adaptive, I lean toward the opposite view—that the rodents’ mood systems’ immobility response is probably healthier than prolonged struggle. It certainly helps them survive longer under these conditions.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic