Death, Depression, Firefighters, Great Friends
Learn to achieve, risk death
Learn to relate, risk depression
At puberty, females become twice as likely to experience depression as males. Males become three times as likely to die as females. These two conditions persist past the age of forty.
Why Death? Why Depression?
When we experience a significant, unexpected loss, we respond with two principal behaviors: We take risk to regain what was lost, and we cope with the distress caused by the loss. Both of these behaviors are specialized and require the development of significant skill to be effective. We must either be firefighters or great friends.
We use these skills under duress, so we build them in at-risk environments. Depression and death can be thought of as the costs of trying to build skills necessary for future life threats.
(To simplify my writing, I will make categorical statements and attributions related to gender. Depression can be pathological and debilitating. Death is death. Please excuse any suggestion of insensitivity.)
Testosterone Addled with a Death Wish
When my mother tried to explain the difference between raising teen-age boys and girls, she said, “Boys are easy. They are just testosterone addled with a death wish. Girls are much more complicated...”
Who’s going to argue with mom?
Imagine tribal living. Your foraging band returns home and discovers a rival-tribe raiding party killed a few of your people, took most of the food and many women. What do you do?
An appropriate response might be to get back what you can, to raid the raiders perhaps. Only those most able to perform this risky behavior, those who have practiced raiding and warfare, have a chance of surviving the attempt to recover the loss. Similarly, only a firefighter can charge into a burning building with the rational expectation that a) he has a reasonable chance to survive and that b) the recovery of life and the unburnt materials justifies the increased chance of death. Anyone else is too likely to perish, in either warfare or flames.
Teenagers who are “testosterone-addled with a death wish,” who I will call “boys,” practice at-risk behavior. They fight, raid, and otherwise expose themselves to high-risk environments. They wander down dark empty streets at night, play football, drive like maniacs, tell dad he’s an asshole, and so on. Each time, they expose themselves to the risk of accidental or violent death. With each exposure, “boys” must discover, develop and practice behaviors designed to minimize peril and maximize gain.
As we know, some are more testosterone-addled and less skilled than others. The death rate of boys is higher: Accidents do happen, and violent responses do kill. The ones who survive have better ‘firefighting’ skills. To put a point on it, warfare and murder are the largest cause of death of young men in tribal societies, the ancestral background most determinant of human evolution.
“Everything A Crisis”
Mom never did explain why girls were more complicated. I think my sister did, though. One night she had a fit because a friend hadn’t called for some reason.
“Sweetie, I understand,” Dad said. “And you know, sometimes people just can’t call you right back.”
“You just don’t understand!” The chair banged on the kitchen tile floor as my sister stormed off. I watched her spilled milk dribble on the floor. The dogs hurried over, collar tags jingling, and licked up.
Mom shook her head, and followed.
Dad retrieved a beer from the refrigerator, took a long sip, then asked to no one in particular, “Why is everything a crisis?!”
I sniggered, but then again, I was severely testosterone-addled.
How do you understand someone else’s crisis? How do you have the tolerance and ability to track and modulate your internal experience when someone is describing a horrifying loss? How do you learn to comfort? How do you become someone else’s attachment figure? How do you access and make use of other people’s assistance with your own distress? How do you become an effective interpersonal, sociobiological regulator - in other words, a great friend?
To develop these skills, “girls” practice in a crisis-rich environment. The social life of teenage girls can be just such an environment. Crisis, loss, distress, dissonance, trauma, and neuroticism are all qualities of a high-crisis social environment. As they practice, girls develop resilience, experience posttraumatic growth, and endure lingering trauma, in combination.
The increased rate of accidental death is the cost of practicing risk-taking behaviors. The increased incidence and severity of depression is the cost of practicing intra- and inter-personal distress-managing behaviors. Dying is easy to explain. Depression...
Crises are triggered by loss. Loss of what?
The analytical answer is: loss of the abilities and resources necessary to live an optimal life - the loss of life fitness. The more we have lost, the greater our peril: we are more likely to die and less likely to have children. Large classes of loss are of social status (for example, exclusion from groups, humiliation) and access to attachment figures (for example, loss of friendships, individuation from parents).
My best friend wanted to impress a boy. She told him I had pubic hair. Now everyone makes fun of me.
Or,
Mom is such a bitch. She told dad I was going on a date with a senior and now dad won’t let me out of the house.
In these crises, circumstances cannot be controlled and are overwhelming. A defining quality of a crisis is helplessness. We are a victim and no amount of ‘correct thinking’ will overturn the emotionality. This experience is likely to provoke three archetypical thoughts:
- I am not able.
- I am not worthy.
- I should have known.
Great friends must believe in their own ability, worthiness and sense-making creativity in order to help others process the archetypical thoughts of victimhood, feel relief from distress, and find a renewed sense of their internal capacities. Otherwise, the victim emotionality of one reinforces the same sensations in the other.
As “boys” might seek frequent exposure to at-risk circumstances, “girls” might be forced to manage exposure to internal distress and the distress of others. It is likely that my verb choices ‘seek’ and ‘be forced’ are accurate. Firefighters must choose to run into a burning build, yet great friends are forced to offer compassion whenever circumstances demand.
We develop great-friendship skills in a high crisis environment. This environment significantly increases the potential for depression. We are chronically exposed to three things - low mood, high emotionality and lack of context.
Low mood is caused by the loss of life fitness. We feel fatigue, lose motivation, think pessimistically and even cry frequently. These behaviors limit our willingness to take additional risks to our life fitness, appropriately so: we are already in peril. Instead, we seek to withdraw and find safety.
These losses are emotionally charged. They create overwhelming, affect-laden, sensory-based memories. They don’t make obvious sense, and often invalidate previously held beliefs and assumptions. The context for the emotional experience is weak. Consequently, if everything is a crisis, the life is filled with too much emotionality and too little context.
What is context? Context is our somatic markers, biases, scripts, schemas, personalized mind-blindness, unchallengeable doubts and certainties, internal working models, values and personality. Context is nothing less than the model of the world and how we most effectively and efficiently respond to it. Context allows us to make sense.
Each event, particularly high-arousal events, creates both sensory-based memories and contextual memories; but if we don’t have context or lose context, we are left with emotional experience. We lack explanation and cannot anchor our sense of helplessness to some external circumstance. Instead, we suffer the victim’s archetypical thinking. Our self-regard suffers, our capacity for self-regulation diminishes, and we distrust our sense-making creativity. All three changes are markers for increased risk of depression.
Low moods, emotionality and lack of context create both distress and dissonance. We become neurotic - appropriately so.
Neuroticism is a personality trait just like height is a physical trait. Neuroticism is neither good nor bad. There are circumstances where being taller than average is advantageous, and there are circumstances where being more neurotic than average is advantageous.
Neuroticism is a style of responding to dissonance, negative emotions and low mood states. It keys the search for better beliefs, assumptions and insight, for the means to improve the chance for survival and opportunities to recover the loss of fitness. Our neuroticism directs the development of context.
People who have lower levels of neuroticism are likely to accept rudimentary explanations for distress, make naive plans address it, and be comforted by the reassurances of others. They might seem to get over distress more easily, but have less drive to actually create more resources.
If we cannot tolerate continued distress while we seek improved context, then neuroticism undermines our ability to recover from loss. If we can tolerate distress, then neuroticism fuels competitiveness, motivation and willingness to avoid unnecessary hazards. Neurotic college kids, who can manage college’s associated distress, are more successful than less neurotic kids, for example.
In a high-crisis environment - high-school for example - we are challenged with the need to repeatedly rebuild our crisis-diminished sense of ability, worthiness and understanding. Imagine this cycle: a crisis, then the combination of low mood, high emotionality, diminished context, then neurotic thinking and searching, then limited recovery and loss of resources, and finally, repeat. That way lies depression.
A history of depression is the single best prediction of risk for future depression. As resources are lost (from past crises and depression), the risk of future depression grows. Additionally, in response to increased depression risk and a history of failure of past behaviors to handle the crises, we are likely to adopt maladaptive defenses. With declining resources and increasingly maladaptive defenses, depression becomes longer, more severe and more pathological. This outcome is the equivalent to death when practicing risk-taking behaviors.
Death is a “boy’s” curse. Depression is a “girl’s.” Growth requires risk, loss and recovery. We grow up, but sometimes, instead of growing, we wither or die. Everyone is a strange mixture of strength and damage. We all can be great friends and share our strengths. We all need great friends for help with our damage. It’s our nature.
Context For Transcendence
A simple organism swims along and enters a patch of acidic water. It reacts and swims away. For a patch of food-rich water, it swims in and enjoys the bounty. Water, to this organism, is its context.
Our context, our pool of water, is a mental creation. Our context is nothing less than a creative representation of the sum of our knowledge. And like a fish not noticing water, we hardly notice our context, until it is invalidated and must be updated to accommodate new experience.
Those who suffer crisis are the ones who seek new understanding, new insight, who swim away from the acidic water and will revel in discovered bounty. Those who suffer are the ones most likely to find spirituality and a sense of transcendence. Spirituality is context and the sensations of transcendence are its bounty. Grace itself is found here.
Essays
Reader Comments (2)
Cole, hello, I followed you here from your post on Steven Aitchison's excellent blog.
What a profoundly and beautifully expressed essay, Cole. So many illuminating points. Thank you.
I need to reread it, but I also want to meditate on your words in the context of Japanese society, and what has been happening here in recent years.
So I will probably return with another comment.
Meantime, I especially appreciate your insight:
"Our context, our pool of water, is a mental creation. Our context is nothing less than a creative representation of the sum of our knowledge. And like a fish not noticing water, we hardly notice our context, until it is invalidated and must be updated to accommodate new experience."
Cole, from the mountains in Japan, thank you - Catrien Ross.
Catrien, your awesome compliments made me blush :) Your comment gives me perspective too, the kind which helps me find depth and satisfaction in my work here. Thanks you.
It would be kind of you to share further thoughts.