Today's post is by Dan Cavedon-Taylor who is the author of a paper to appear in Synthese entitled "Must depression be irrational?"
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| Dan Cavedon-Taylor |
From Capgras syndrome to schizophrenia, anorexia to obsessive-compulsive disorders, mental health conditions are thought to entail failures of epistemic rationality. This includes depression, which is often conceptualised by philosophers as necessarily involving mental states that are ‘unwarranted by’ or ‘disproportionate to’ events in one’s life (Davies 2016; Wakefield & Demazeux 2016; Tully 2019).
Call this view of depression, the ‘Irrationality View’. For some of us, the Irrationality View seems plainly incorrect. There appears to be a clear difference, in rational terms, between depression caused by change in season versus depression caused by, e.g., homelessness, refuge experience, serious assault, and perhaps even gaslighting (Abrahams 2024). For that reason, I think we ought to prefer a Mixed View of depression and its relation to rationality. On the Mixed View, depression is sometimes epistemically well-supported and sometimes not, much like other mental states.
In my paper “Must Depression be Irrational?” I make two objections against the Irrationality View and sketch a novel version of the Mixed View. In doing so, I grapple with a puzzle that faces those of us sympathetic to the Mixed View.
The Puzzle: Imagine someone, Aaron, who has lived through great trauma—say, refugee experience as a result of war. But suppose that he has not, as a consequence, become depressed. Intuitively, that is something to celebrate: Aaron has come face-to-face with some of the worst experiences that life can offer and he has emerged psychologically unscathed.
Not so on the Mixed View. For, on the Mixed View, Aaron is rationally sub-optimal. After all, the View is likely to think it is rationally appropriate for Aaron to be depressed, given the traumatic situations he has experienced. So then whatever prevents him from being depressed, whether that is psychological resilience or various coping strategies, are barriers to Aaron’s achieving a better rational standing, i.e. by stopping him from being depressed! But this seems a ludicrous thing to say. Intuitively, it can only be a good thing, and in no way bad a thing (rationally or otherwise) that someone who has experienced great trauma has not become depressed as a result.
One reply on behalf of the Mixed View bites the bullet (Graham 1990): if Aaron has lived through seriously traumatic events, yet not become depressed, then he must be deceived about his situation in some way or else failed to grasp the awfulness of his situation.
This reply seems wrong to me. People can be fully aware that life is bad for them, but attempt to meet its challenges head on, rather than shrink away.
A better reply takes the perspective of epistemic consequentialism (Dunn & Ahlstrom-Vij 2017; Singer 2018; see also Bortolotti & Miyazono 2016): given what Aaron has lived through, it is rationally appropriate for him to be depressed; but overall, he is rationally better off not depressed. For were Aaron to become depressed, greater rational harms would await him.
What rational harms? Those associated with depression: difficulties discarding false beliefs (Silberman et al. 1983), coarser-grained memories (Evans et al. 1992), problems understanding others (Goddard et al. 1996), and challenges thinking about the future (Williams et al. 1996), to name only a few. What is more, these do not automatically go away when one recovers from depression (Hasselbalch et al. 2011).
Depression would thus be a severe rational downgrade for Aaron. And so, weighing the rational good of being in a state it is rationally appropriate for Aaron to be in, against the rationally bad consequence of his being depressed, it is, on balance, a good thing from the point of view of rationality that he is not.