A Happy Wolf Can Still Be Run Over By A Tractor Trailer

I came across a depression study involving mouse drowning. What I didn't realize is that drowning mice is quite a thing in the behavioral sciences. There is a whole, how shall I say, tradition, of mouse drowning. I imagine there are schools where you have to take mouse drowning 101, held in the old gymnasium with the leaky roof. And it's so deviantly easy to "accidentally" drop a mouse in a bucket of water and watch what it does for the next 20 to 30 minutes or however long it takes.

And what does all the mouse drowning get you? A loose fitting mammalian paradigm? More questions? Mice on anti-depressants showed increased intervals of "escape behaviors" during the first 5 or 10 minutes (of said drowning) than mice who were not (on anti-depressants) ... arguably. So the take-away I guess is that depressed mice tend to give up easier, which is quite the epiphany from a bunch of guys in lab coats shooting rubber bands at drowning mice ... It works for the drug companies who pump out more anti-depressants for all the human equivalents out there. People who suffer from being chronically thrown into the deep ends of swimming pools by a giant hand.

No, I think more significant are the questions these studies raise. Like "who came up with this?" And  "why didn't their parents teach them to be nice to poor defenseless animals?" And "why are there persistent contexts within said paradigm where the non-anti-depressant mice survive longer than the anti-depressant mice?"

By entertaining this question of course you perpetuate the mouse drowning game. It's like trying to convince a neighborhood bully to stop throwing rocks at a chained up dog and as you talk to him you throw a few rocks ... Anyway, so it turns out that the Prozac mice fought to escape longer and in doing so exhausted their poor little life-stores faster. I know, another bombshell revelation ... Apparently they deduced in their mouse drowning observations that quitting the anti-depressant-fueled "escape behaviors" delayed the inevitable drowning because they survived longer just floating there with just their little noses above water.

Now if we can put aside all the "what kind of person does this for a living?" questions, it brings up all kinds of possibilities ... If you are depressed because an invisible free floating hand hovers around your head slapping you hard every time you blink ... and someone says "why don't you go have some fun instead of complaining all the time?" You can say, "I am going to quit this mind-drowning conversation so as to entreat with imbeciles another day!"

Who knows, with a little polish and panache "quitting can save you from imminent death" can be the new "hard work and perseverance can make your dreams come true."

But the really really important question in all this carnage is weather a predisposition to depressed state can confer evolutionary benefits, i.e., can depression itself be an advantage? We are so quick to denounce depression as a disorder ... a sickness you address with pills, strong mind-altering and personality altering pills ... But depression may simply be a natural rest and regeneration phase as we see with the drowning mice. A wounded wolf will hide and sleep a lot to presumably effect healing -- does a moth messenger fly into her den offering her wolfie-Prozac maybe causing her to cheerfully and prematurely leave her den and die? Of course not.


So then, why do we stigmatize depression? Why is it ok for a wolf to be depressed but not a human?