INCOMPLETE

I am living in an extraordinary generation. Although “youthfulness” once meant vigor, hope, and excitement, my young generation is overwhelmingly depressed, cynical, lacking hope. This is a real problem, not a simply imagined one, as evidenced by increasing rates of suicide. This is leading many to ask “What's happening to our kids?”

I don't have an answer, but I do have theories and anecdotes. I myself struggled with depression for a good part of my life. I do not consider myself or my experience to be “normal”, but I exist in the same social climate as others, and I am more “in touch” with people my own age.

One of the pitfalls people who are curious about depression have is to assume that depression is merely a normal emotional state. That is, although it is certainly not normal to be sad all of the time, a depressed person is simply a person that always has a legitimate reason to be sad. This is not the case, but you'd be forgiven for thinking it was.

Clinical depression is somewhat well understood to be caused by an imbalance of chemicals, specifically serotonin. The main problem in depression, as far as I understand it, is that serotonin is being absorbed too quickly by the brain ¹⁾. Serotonin is a “happy chemical”, although it responds to different stimuli than it's more well known cousin, dopamine. I see it described as a mood stabilizer that prevents any of the other moods from getting out of hand. So, it prevents you from being in a constant state of panic at all of the many, many things that could go wrong around us at any given time, for example.

Something doesn't add up with these three, apparently true, facts:

• Rates of depression are going up
• Depression is a chemical disorder, and, therefore, genetic
• There have been no major genetic changes in the population

So, it's a genetic condition, and rates of it are going up, but our genes aren't changing. What the heck is going on? Well, like all apparent contradictions in the world, the devil is in the details. There are a few possible explanations.

One theory is that nothing is actually changing in the population. What is actually changing is the testing criteria. Similar to the apparent increase of autism, it may be that we are now better at spotting signs of the disorder. I find this hard to believe, because, if rates of depression aren't going up, why are rates of suicide going up? Being diagnosed with a thing doesn't give you the symptoms of the thing.

I made the assertion that since depression is a chemical disorder, it is a genetic disorder. While this could be true, it isn't necessarily true. Perhaps elements in our environment that are causing depression. I am not making the claim that people are depressed for normal reasons, such as a lack of human connection, but rather that an unknown, possibly chemical, factor is at play. It's well known, for example, that things that a mother does to her body while pregnant may effect her baby permanently . Even non-developmental things may be at play. For example, I recently saw a study linking air pollution to mental illness.

This is the explanation that I find most likely. Basically, the idea is that depression has always existed, but hasn't always been a problem, because the context in which individuals lived prevented it from being a problem. Consider the difference between a human living 16,000 years ago, about when society really started, and a human today. I would argue that one of the most incredible elements of humanity in general is the fact that genetically we haven't really changed that much. That amount of time is a moment in evolutionary time. Instead, as a culture, we have evolved.

Furthermore, the basic structure of our brains also hasn't changed for a long time, because it works so well. Monkeys share our basic brain structure, and have been observed acting as we do. What really changed is that we, as humans, have more cognitive abilities. This was an evolutionary advantage, so it happened.

I conjecture that evolution has never solved this problem because it never needed to. The environment we lived in regulated depression. Think about chimps. Chimps have never really changed their environment. ²⁾So there would be no evolutionary advantage to addressing a problem that would only ever result from the environment changing. Therefore, if depression is caused by the environment changing, then there would be no advantage to fixing it.

You might wonder why we have it in the first place. Well, to answer that question we have to take off our “intelligent evolution” glasses. There are many things in our genes that don't serve a purpose and are just kind of there. It's well known that there's a good bit of DNA with no discernable purpose. Some of this is even conjectured to be a result of viral infections.

As I indicated in the previous section, talking about causes of the epidemic is hard. So, take all of this with a grain of salt.

Community is an important part of being human. There is a reason societies formed - people need to be around others. We need to be around others for the resources they provide, certainly, but also for the connections that we make with others.

The fact is that communities are not a means to an end, but an end in themselves. We need them in order to know who we are in context and relationship to others. Sure, a balance between self and society must be found, and people must forge a part of their identity on their own. But there must be a balance. I call the part of a person's identity that is shaped by their society their “social ethic”.

Young people are more likely to take a functional view of society.