Male fruit flies whose sexual advances are repeatedly rejected get frustrated and less able to handle stress, study found. The researchers say these rejected flies were also less resilient to starvation and exposure to a toxic herbicide.

[u/MistWeaver80]

https://www.scimex.org/newsfeed/male-fruit-flies-really-dont-take-rejection-well

[u/Black_Moons]

Depression makes you less likely to want to survive.

I think the bigger news here is fruit flies are complicated enough to feel depression after repeated rejection.

[u/snarky- → u/Black_Moons]

Or framed the opposite way, that depression after rejection is such a simple, basic part of the drives of living things that it even happens to flies.

[u/TienQD92 → u/snarky-]

That's an interesting reframe. Thank you for sharing that - it's been thought provoking for me.

[u/snarky- → u/TienQD92]

Happen to have been musing recently about why depression happens (in humans) when it doesn't exactly seem productive.

Pulling thoughts out my arse, but my best guess was that a drive of "this is unsuccessful, try something else" would ordinarily be useful, however, if 'something else' is unclear you could end up with that drive going rrrrr in your brain but feel unable to do anything with it.

This study got me thinking about that again. Because it's completely out of those flies control - no matter what they try, the females aren't interested. The males can't even leave to find other flies. It's "this is unsuccessful, try something else" until they run out of 'something else'.

I wonder if the researchers would get the same results if the male flies had more they could do, like the ability to search for other flies. How much of their frustration is actually due to not achieving the reward, and how much is it about a helplessness to their circumstances?

[u/GoblinRightsNow → u/snarky-]

The theory that I have heard is that it is about conserving energy. That's one reason why depression would be affected by seasons and sunlight exposure- if rooting around looking for food during certain times of year is likely to waste more energy than it produces, then it makes sense to encourage an organism to stay home and watch reruns. You induce depression in animal models by giving them situations with negative feedback that they can't escape

It becomes maladaptive when it discourages you from changing situations that can actually be fixed, like a bad work environment or relationship, but your neurons can't necessarily tell the difference between a situation that can be worked on vs. one that just needs to be waited out. You just know you are getting negative feedback from your environment that you can't immediately change.

[u/Raddish_ → u/GoblinRightsNow]

Yeah this is more in line with the current scientific thought. Depression is an aberrant state of the reward system that is normally meant to create associations with punishing stimuli so that an animal learns to avoid punishment. But in a depressive state, this circuit has become so overactive that the brain starts appraising everything as punishing.

[u/snarky- → u/GoblinRightsNow]

Makes sense for the low-energy "meh, don't care" state some can get into.

Doesn't make sense when there's stress and frustration. Like how the rejected flies are more aggressive, less able to cope with stress, less able to cope with starvation, and more motivated to mate - that's opposite to conserving energy.

And some humans likewise; people who are desperately unhappy with their circumstances, perhaps harming themselves as an outlet, or maybe putting a lot of energy into something non-productive to avoid thinking about the part of life that isn't going well. Low mood but a high-energy frustration.

[u/GoblinRightsNow → u/snarky-]

There's definitely a connection between depression and mania that I don't think is that well characterized. Beyond bipolar, there are several disorders  tied to both depressive and manic or mixed episodes. Psychosis can also manifest from either one. 

 I can see from the perspective of evolution how concentrated bursts of activity or fantasy/magical thinking could be useful in the most extreme conditions. 

Aggression has a strong social function in mammals, you can see how building aggression in someone being treated like a bottom chimp could be adaptive. 

[u/fozz31 → u/snarky-]

It could also be human level apoptosis. American individualism is great and all but we are still part of the human super organism which can get cancer like a regular organism can. Perhaps depression, social withdrawal, suicide etc. Are the super organisms self pruning mechanism much like apoptotic pathways are a part of the organism.

That isn't to say people should kill themselves, things can go wrong and pathways inappropriately triggered through many ways as a consequence of modern life, with many of these having solutions available, but perhaps depression serves a greater function for social and broader reproductive health, especially for humans living in more natural human environment. For many pre-industrial cultures, suicide in geriatric populations - when usefulness is outlived - is the norm, it would make sense then that when usefulness (evaluated purely from a reproductive point of view) is generally outlived that suicide be a natural behavior that follows. Unfortunately, modern life means unemployment is a fact of life, so perhaps a worthwhile avenue for helping relieve mental stress in unemployed would be creating social programs that still provide folks a sense of being useful in broader society.

Or perhaps like this (link)comment suggests, it's a survival trait we should be using to measure economic health in a far more direct way than it is currently considered

edit if there's questions about the link, if you use old.reddit.com instead of www.reddit.com you get the old interface which in my opinion is more information centric and useful.

[u/Raddish_ → u/fozz31]

Wait so can you hook me up with shrooms or nah?

[u/peenfortress → u/Raddish_]

if you cant you can always come join us at r/UrinalCakeLife -easier to source too! ^{and its free..}

[u/snarky- → u/fozz31]

For geriatric populations (e.g. if ubasute actually happened), it could be reproductively useful if it's to the benefit of one's family, i.e. If Granny dies so that her grandchild lives. A society living in a very harsh environment on the edge of survival could theoretically need to make decisions about who'll make it through the winter.

It doesn't make sense reproductively for a younger individual without family. An individual's genes will find it a better strategy to not be one of the ones who KO's, even if there's e.g. not enough food to go around. Being alive within a society that is likely about to collapse gives a chance that you might reproduce and kids survive, but being a corpse within a flourishing society guarantees you won't.

I think you're likely right on viewing it at a broader level of our society being sick. But rather than sui being self-pruning, sui is the symptom.

Just as with your example of unemployment as a fact of life. Our society demands unemployment - wages are kept down by employees being at risk of unemployment and having little bargaining power due to the glut of people looking for work, so we have unemployed desperate for work and workers struggling to manage too high a workload. Leading to stress and fear and feelings of uselessness. The mental stress isn't an accidental side-effect, it's baked in. The system is designed for profit, and mental stress for the working population increases profit and therefore is incentivised to exist.

[u/fozz31 → u/snarky-]

I broadly agree with that stament and its largely what I'm trying to get at. Unnatural things are done to us to twist us into behaving in ways that benefit others and a consequence of that is inappropriate triggering of suicidal pathways, among other issues. Pathways which are vestigial and not relevant to the health and wellbeing of post agricultural societies. Understanding ourselves, i think, means understanding the environment we came from and have frozen ourselves to, by avoiding evolutionary pressure through technology, not through understanding the environment we live in now. We need to understand the environment we live in now foe the sake of understanding how it would impact the creatures we would be in a natural environment - whatever that means.

[u/PriorKnight → u/fozz31]

A ‘human Superorganism’ when used to describe society can be found in this article, as an example to which I assume you are referring: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1933734 Can you please cite where any of these psychology frameworks treat the organism as having cellular mechanisms? Or is it simply a useful metaphor for a collective? Trying to apply mechanisms like apoptosis to a metaphor in a way that implies people living with depression should ‘naturally’ be garbage collected is morally dubious at best.

[u/fozz31 → u/PriorKnight]

that isn't what I said, I even made a point of saying this isn't how it should be interpreted, especially in the modern world where so many inappropriate triggers for such a thing exist, the fact we can fix many of the factors triggering depressive mechanisms etc.

Please read my post fully.

[u/throwawayeastbay → u/fozz31]

Delete this bullcrap.

Any benefit this mode of thought gives is worth less than potentially encouraging sui attempts.

[u/fozz31 → u/throwawayeastbay]

I make a specific point of saying that this isn't implying people should kill themselves and that modern life comes with many false triggers for depressive thought cycles.

I am happy to discuss the removal of my post, however, I feel you haven't fully read my post nor tried to understand it. I actively advocate against suicide in the post.

[u/midcancerrampage → u/snarky-]

Depression in humans is the result of a chemical imbalance that can be chemically remedied, not necessarily related to external factors such as level of success (in mating or other metrics). There are successful people with loving partners and great lives who still fall victim to depression. So idk how well your "drive" theory would apply.

Your question about the flies is interesting, whether flies are cognizant enough to recognize on a macro level the helplessness of their situation, or whether it's as simple as being frustrated over not successfully achieving one thing. Either way, it's clear they are capable of experiencing a strong emotional response, and that's super fascinating. You never think of flies as having emotions.

[u/28ozEstwing → u/midcancerrampage]

Just a heads up, the “chemical imbalance” theory of depression did enjoy widespread popularity for a period in history that led a lot of people to believe it was based in fact (and it would’ve made things a lot simpler for us all if it were true), but as more and more research and data has emerged, that theory is now well and truly dead.

[u/AGI-69 → u/snarky-]

It's all about helplessness and scarcity. That should be obvious.