Would you advocate for permanent removal of depression?

Assume there is a cure which can get rid of depression from everyone, depression would never exist in this world again, would you advocate to remove this neurological disorder or not? and reason why?

Below are excepts from the book "The Power of Neurodiversity" by Thomas Armstrong

"In my book The Noonday Demon, I wrote about how grappling with depression had given me strength and depth of character and said that while major depression is a horrifying illness that should be erased from human experience, the mood spectrum that includes extreme sadness is essential to our capacity for love. I would not be myself without those diversities." - Andrew Solomon

"Depressed people, although sadder, appear to be wiser than nondepressed individuals. Perhaps the epidemic of depression in our culture has more to do with a realistic appraisal of world events and a refusal to sugarcoat life than with an abnormal propensity toward gloominess. As Jungian psychologist James Hillman points out, “Sometimes I think there’s an underlying depression in our culture. . . . It makes me think that if you’re not depressed, you’re abnormal because the soul knows about the trees that are destroyed, the buildings that are destroyed, the ugliness that is spreading, the chaos of the culture in many ways . . . and somehow if you’re not in mourning for what’s going on in the world, you’re cut off from the soul of the world. So in that sense I would think an underlying depression is a kind of adaptation to the reality of the world.”

In that sense, depression may violate a key social value in our culture that raises the emotion of “happiness” to the highest point in our pantheon of emotions. As a culture we’re fixated on happiness: the happy face, the happy meal, the how-to-be-happy self-help books. A poll conducted by the Pew Research Center indicated that 85 percent of Americans believe they are happy or very happy. Eric G. Wilson, professor of English at Wake Forest University, writes in his book Against Happiness, “We wonder if the wide array of antidepressants will one day make sweet sorrow a thing of the past. We wonder if soon enough every single American will be happy. . . . What are we to make of this American obsession with happiness that could well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse? . . . Aren’t we . . . troubled by our culture’s overemphasis on happiness? Don’t we fear that this rabid focus . . . leads to half-lives, to bland existences, to waste-lands of mechanistic behavior?” Similarly, Emmy Gut states, “In a competitive industrial, technocratic, and combative society as ours, it is an unacceptable thought that the depressed affect causing us to slow down and withdraw into ourselves could be useful and necessary to our personal development and to our adaptation to change. In business and industry, in military service, and in public education, where human activity is conducted in keeping with rigid time schedules, only physical disability is—grudgingly—tolerated as an excuse for deserting one’s desk, one’s machine, or one’s platoon during working hours.”

The experience of depression, then, could represent a certain kind of revolt against core American values, a protest against a busy society, where the individual is bargaining for some time off to look at life and its complex problems and find a way to cope with it all. There is research from the field of evolutionary psychology indicating that this may be why depression evolved in the first place. Evolutionary psychologists suggest that depression may have initially developed as a way of dealing with extraordinary levels of goal frustration: an inability to hunt, difficulty in obtaining the mate of one’s choice, insufficient help with child care, or other prehistoric tasks. Depression served, first, to put the brakes on so that some time could be given to searching out possible solutions (this may be the function of rumination in depression). In some cases, unrealistic goals needed to be abandoned. In other cases, a change in niche was required (a hunter needed to become a gatherer or vice versa). Second, it served as a way of extorting help from one’s contemporaries. The depressed person was essentially saying, “If I refuse to hunt, or care for my child, or withdraw my labor from the labor pool—if I go on strike—maybe you’ll see how valuable I am as a resource to the tribe and you’ll give me some support.”


On the other hand, the manic pole of mood disorders may have evolved as a way of increasing one’s energy to a peak level so that one could engage in sexual or aggressive activities that ultimately would have advanced one’s genetic cause and lead to the passing of one’s genes on to future generations. As psychiatrist Jim Phelps points out, “Several mood experts have speculated that mania might be ‘too much of a good thing,’ where the good thing is the confidence, the drive, the ability to motivate oneself and get things done, the decrease in need for sleep, and even the increased sexual activity, of the top-of-the-heap animals in a social hierarchy.”


It may be that these deeper evolutionary reasons behind depression and bipolar disorder help explain the link between mood disorders and creativity. Eons of introverted melancholic problem solving, on the one hand, and intense levels of peak energy, on the other, may have laid the groundwork for creative pathways in modern times. As far back as Greek antiquity, Aristotle commented on this link: “Why is it that all men who have become outstanding in philosophy, statesmanship, poetry or the arts are melancholic, and some to such an extent that they are infected by the diseases arising from black bile? . . . They are all, as has been said, naturally of this character.” Psychologist Arnold Ludwig surveyed one thousand eminent individuals of the twentieth century and discovered that 77 percent of poets, 54 percent of fiction writers, 50 percent of visual artists, and 46 percent of composers had undergone at least one significant depressive episode in their lives. This compared with only 16 percent for sports figures, 5 percent for military leaders, and 0 percent for explorers.16 Psychiatrist Nancy Andreasen interviewed thirty writers from the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop, discovering that 80 percent had experienced at least one episode of an affective disorder (e.g., major depression or bipolar disorder), compared with 30 percent for a control group. Two-thirds of the writers had received psychiatric treatment for their disorder.


Studies at Stanford University have revealed important links between creativity and bipolar disorder. In one study, it was revealed that healthy artists and individuals with manic depression scored higher on creativity tests than did people in the general population. In another study, children with bipolar disorder and children of bipolar parents scored higher on creativity tests than healthy control children. Psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison, author of the seminal book Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (and herself a bipolar individual), records in detail the links between bipolar symptoms and creative expression among writers and artists through the centuries, stating, “Who would not want an illness that has among its symptoms elevated and expansive mood, inflated self-esteem, abundance of energy, less need for sleep, intensified sexuality, and . . . ‘sharpened and unusually creative thinking’ and ‘increased productivity’?”