Depression: An Evolutionary Understanding, by Dr. Jonathan Rottenberg

Amy Alkon's HumanLab -- The Science Between Us, a weekly show with the luminaries of behavioral science.

We have a depression epidemic in this country, now affecting more than 15% of the population, and it’s striking people at younger and younger ages. It seems clear that our current modes of understanding and treating depression just aren’t working.

My guest tonight, psychologist Dr. Jonathan Rottenberg, draws on research to show why we are failing to help depression sufferers and turns to our evolutionary roots to offer a nuanced understanding of why we get depressed, explaining why our modern environment’s mismatch with our evolved psychology can drag us depression. All of this leads to insights on how we might help depression sufferers get better, or, at the very least, not lead them to feel defective and broken because they are depressed. 

His inspiring and scientifically rigorous book we’ll be discussing tonight is The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic. 

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