I can imagine this, even though I have no training in psychology. One of my daughters is a psych NP and deals with brain chemistry primarily, though the psychology part is largely “unlearning inappropriate coping mechanisms”. That latter thing is interesting. The coping mechanisms can be helpful when one is heavily beset by depression, but can become destructive if one’s brain chemistry is corrected so that one no longer “has to cope”.
One wonders just a little about the degree, if any, to which any of this is actually a “survival strategy”. Most human traits are. I recall once talking to my mother about my father’s people after my father’s death. He and his people were all very much given to anxiety and many of them had alcohol problems. My mother expressed her curiosity as to why so many of them would be that way.
Half of the Irish had come from County Mayo, on the west coast of Ireland. Vikings often landed there long ago and were sometimes so pervasive they created the coloration of “white Irish”. But they were also rapacious killers. I tossed off a comment that perhaps their anxiety was a “survival strategy”. Hear unusual splashing on the sea at night and you would be instantly put in terror and would run away to some hidden glen. Generation after generation, they lived with that and the Vikings got all the careless ones.
Anyway, and while I was more than half joking, I’m not entirely sure that even depression isn’t a survival strategy of some sort, in some context, especially if combined with some other condition like mania or paranoia. It could be a survival trait that has outlived its usefulness.
