The drive to resist compulsion is more important to wild
animals than sex, food, or water. He [J. L. Kavanau] found
that captive white-footed mice spent inordinate time and
energy just resisting experimental manipulation. If the
experimenters turned the lights up, the mouse spent his
time setting them down. If the experimenters turned the
lights down, the mouse turned them up….
A drive for competence or to resist compulsion is … a
drive to avoid helplessness.
—Martin E. P. Seligman, Helplessness
When supplies of certain chemicals made by our brains become depleted, depression can result. When this happens, not only are we emotionally depressed, but our immune systems are also depressed, resulting in a decreased ability to fight off infectious diseases and even cancer. As we age, our brain’s ability to produce and respond to many brain chemicals falls
off, making depression more likely. Read on to find out what you can do about your own depressions.
We have three reasons for including a separate chapter on depression in this section about life extension:
(1) you would not want to live a long time if you were depressed,
(2) depression is much more common in old age, and
(3) depression has a major deleterious effect on general health and on the probability of surviving stresses.
When events are outside our control, we are helpless. The state of being helpless or believing that one is helpless (even if it is not really true) can cause depression, illness, and sudden death in experimental animals and in people.
Dr. J. M. Weiss believes that the negative physiological consequences of helplessness are caused by depletion of norepinephrine (NE) in the brain. After plunging rats into very cold water for six minutes, he tested their ability to escape shock in a shuttle box which had a low barrier that the animal would have to leap over to reach a shock-free area. These rats
displayed helplessness (inability to escape shock by jumping over the low barrier). When measured the NE in the brains of these rats was found to be depleted. Rats that were put into warm water for six minutes did not suffer from NE depletion or from helplessness in the shuttle box (they successfully escaped the shock by jumping the barrier).
In later experiments, an NE depletor, alpha-methyl-para-tyrosine, administered to rats also caused failure to escape shock in the shuttle box. If NE depletion is significantly involved in the biochemical events of learned helplessness, then phenylalanine or tyrosine, essential nutrient amino acids used by the brain to make NE, should be very effective in relieving human depressions from a variety of causes.
CAUTION: It is important to keep in mind that serious
depression often requires professional help. The points raised
in this chapter are not intended as a substitute for those pa-
tients in need of help from a psychiatrist or a clinical psychologist. The ideas in this chapter are not intended as a guide for any psychotic condition, including manic-depressive psychosis (for which lithium therapy is often most appropriate); professional help is necessary in such conditions.
Helplessness develops when animals or people believe that their success or failure is independent of their efforts. In such a circumstance, there is no incentive to act. Voodoo, in anecdotal reports, may kill its victims in this way—they believe they cannot help dying, so they die. The children of rich
parents can suffer from helplessness, even though they have many material advantages, because this wealth has no correspondence to their own efforts to succeed.
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