Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EADhvebhPS8

23-02-2012 14:13 Full Story -- bit.ly | Depression: an evolutionary byproduct of the ability to fight infection? Emory University's Andrew Miller, MD, discusses. Miller is professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory and director of psychiatric oncology at Winship Cancer Institute. Background Depression is common enough -- afflicting one in ten adults in the United States -- that it seems the possibility of depression must be "hard-wired" into our brains. This has led biologists to propose several theories to account for how depression, or behaviors linked to it, can somehow offer an evolutionary advantage. Some previous proposals for the role of depression in evolution have focused on how it affects behavior in a socialcontext. A pair of psychiatrists addresses this puzzle in a different way, tying together depression and resistance to infection. They propose that genetic variations that promote depression arose during evolution because they helped our ancestors fight infection. An outline of their proposal appears online in the journal Molecular Psychiatry. The co-authors are Andrew Miller, MD, William P. Timmie professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory and director of psychiatric oncology at Winship Cancer Institute, and Charles Raison, MD, previously at Emory and now at the University of Arizona.

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An Evolutionary View of Depression - Part 1 - Video