Matthew Parris
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I managed to rein it in, and managed the jump without incident, but on landing almost vomited with the psychological tension. Since then I have never regarded paranoiacs as quite as sick or as other as once they seemed.
How do we explain paranoia? Obviously chemicals, fear or fatigue are capable of triggering the mental process but the ability to use gestalt in this way must be incipient in all of us. By what Darwinian process has the human animal become hard-wired to read danger into signals that may not imply danger at all? This, I submit, is a survival mechanism, a precautionary piece of mental circuitry designed to err on the side of overreaction because the consequences of undue suspicion are less life-threatening than to miss a set of sinister clues, which can be fatal. ‘Paranoia’ is simply an inflamed version of a sensitivity which can be life-saving. Stare hard enough at that bush and you see the outlines of the lurking tiger. You might be paranoid, but then again there might be a tiger.
Are many forms of mental illness, similarly, a case of overstimulated survival mechanisms? I wondered about this a few weeks ago, reading reports of research into memory block: a mental process which can cause us genuinely to forget events whose recollection threatens to inflict more pain than we can handle. Selective amnesia could be called a mental illness yet could be a saving force. Psychoanalysts’ attempts to make patients recover and ‘deal with’ buried horrors from the past may be forcing the override of a health-giving piece of brain circuitry.
But what about depression? Or about the ‘bi-polar’ or manic-depressive tendency present to some degree in all of us, to become by turns ‘irrationally’ elated, positive and optimistic, and then unreasonably depressed, passive and pessimistic? Could these too, when experienced to a degree which seriously disables a person, be no more than the hyper-stimulation of what are, at a more moderate level, life-enhancing responses?
It is easier to see how the manic ‘high’ which some experience could be useful within a tribe, if not always to the individual. This — this irrational sense of invulnerability — is what is needed in battle, and can be observed too in fighting-dogs and horses. Kay Jamieson, who writes about and has suffered from bi-polar disorder, says that at high times the bi-polar individual (Churchill, perhaps?) can achieve great things. A rush of confidence and adrenaline touches most of us at times, and the experience is positive, as all athletes know.
But how about the lows? We lack useful estimates of the extent of ‘clinical’ depression in modern Britain, statistics being warped both by the complicity of the medical profession in the drug-peddling tactics of modern drug-company marketing, and by welfare benefit regulations which inflate the diagnosis of depression, which has become the new back pain. Nevertheless serious, bona-fide depression is surely not uncommon, and can be real, crushing and terrifying.
It is also disabling. But could mild depression confer any Darwinian advantage? An associated clutch of mental states such as anxiety, insecurity, worry and stress (even a tendency to take a gloomy view of prospects generally) could be gathered under the term ‘precaution’ and might, I suppose, be seen as a useful arrow in the quiver of any group of animals, though not if all suffer it simultaneously. An excess of blithe optimists is dangerous, and a tribe is the stronger for containing a good few Eeyores, Jeremiahs and Doubting Thomases, even if this makes our own lives less fun. There might be evolutionary reasons for these genes recurring strongly and regularly among our race and being present to some degree in all of us.
So depression may be a form of gestalt too: a way of reading significance into data, and interpreting the world. I am beginning to think that the dual (and linked) roles of gestalt and what I call ‘screening’ — an animal’s ability to screen out and screen in, from an undigested mess of information, what it must focus upon and what it must elbow aside in order to make that focus — are absolutely central to the evolution of a functioning intelligence.
Matthew Parris is a columnist for the Times.
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