John_Maxwell_IV comments on Depression's evolutionary roots - Less Wrong Discussion
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If that were true, I would expect that depression would make you creative, so you could think of creative solutions to your problems. My experience suggests the opposite of this post... when I had a big problem in my life and became depressed about it, I believe that depression made solving the problem significantly harder. In order to solve my problem, I needed to try many different things, none of which had a high probability of working. Depression made me pessimistic that any of them would work, so I was not that motivated.
This bothers me too. In my own experiences with depression, it certainly led to rumination, but not particularly useful rumination. Mostly the same thoughts over and over, and mostly unhelpful ones to boot. (Edit: typo.)