(PS2-C74) Does Depression Have a Purpose? Beliefs About Depression as a “signal” Are Linked to Positive Attitudes About Psychotherapy and Recovery

The past 50 years have seen a marked increase in presenting depression as a “biomedical illness” akin to cancer and diabetes. While these framings often have benevolent motivations to reduce stigma and blame, accumulating research indicates there are some costs to these framings, including poorer expectations for recovery, especially for psychotherapy. It is possible a different framing of depression can help mitigate these costs.

The current research, inspired by social cognition theory and evolutionary psychiatry, examined a novel belief: that depression has a functional purpose. Participants (N=723) were undergraduates from three universities across the United States who completed a series of questionnaires. We developed a novel 10-item scale about depression’s utility called the Functional Depression Scale (FDS; e.g., “Depression is a signal that something in life needs more attention”) and examined its correlations with measures of stigmatizing attitudes, beliefs about recovery, causal beliefs about depression, and attitudes about psychotherapy. The novel measure displayed a normal distribution and adequate internal reliability (α = .75).

Linear regression models used stigmatizing attitudes and recovery beliefs as dependent variables, with the FDS, depression symptom severity, and several causal depression beliefs from the Reasons for Depression Scale as independent variables. This allowed for examination of unique predictions by the FDS in comparison to other beliefs. These analyses revealed that functional beliefs were positively and uniquely related to beliefs that one could recover from depression (b = 0.25, p < .001) and unrelated to the belief that long-term treatment is necessary (b = -0.073, p = .24). In contrast, biomedical beliefs about depression were negatively related to the belief that one could recover from depression (b = -.14, p = .003) and positively related to the belief that long-term treatment is necessary (b = 0.24, p < .001). Finally, moderation analyses suggested that functional beliefs predicted positive attitudes about therapy for those with higher levels of depression (b = 1.44, p = .04) but not among those with lower depression (b = -0.95, p = .34).

These results point to a new direction in depression belief research and indicate that strengths-based beliefs about depression (that it serves a purpose) are associated with optimistic attitudes about recovery and psychotherapy.