of their own being—existentialists afraid to take even the smallest leap of
faith because they’re certain there is no one out there to catch them.
To get better, they must leap, and you must not catch them.
Philosophical considerations aside, remember, in the last chapter,
the characteristics of people who did not succumb to stress: They believed
they were in control of their own lives, they felt connected to something
larger than themselves, and they actively sought out challenges. All three
of these crucial attitudes are damaged by depression. Or perhaps the
damage causes depression, who knows? Regardless of whether it is cause or
effect, this is the damage that must be repaired to cure depression. Feeling
better is merely a side effect.
The Physiology of Depression
Hippocrates thought that depression was caused by too little phlegm and
too much black bile. In the intervening years, the names for what is defi-
cient and overabundant have changed but the theory has stayed pretty
much the same.
Nowadays you can’t talk about depression without mentioning brain
chemistry. This is a relatively modern development. Before the late 1950s
everybody thought depression was merely a psychological disorder. Today,
the psychological part of depression is in danger of being washed away by
tiny droplets of neurotransmitters.
The first modern physiological theories of depression derived from
the stress research of Hans Selye, whom we encountered in an earlier
chapter. Selye said that when exposed to too much environmental stress,
the organism goes into a state of exhaustion, or physiological shutdown. This
model explains the disruption of vegetative functions and the general las-
situde characteristic of many depressions. Stress, the theory said, depletes
the body of something important that is needed for ongoing activity.
ADRENALINE DEFICIT THEORY. One of the earliest suspects was
adrenaline, the hormone that facilitates the fight or flight response by
speeding everything up. The theory said that when you have too much
stress, you run out of adrenaline, slow down, and become depressed. It
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