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Depression isn't about achievement
The success assumption
Gary Gulman had assumed success would make him happy. He was a comedian, he was successful, and it still wasn't like that, so he figured he just hadn't gotten successful enough yet.
Bradshaw and Springsteen
Then quarterback Terry Bradshaw and Bruce Springsteen came out as depressed. Someone answered Bradshaw by pointing out that he was Terry Bradshaw, and Gulman would probably have said the same about Springsteen.
Letting people off the hook
Hearing Springsteen and Phelps showed him it's chemical, and that lets a person off the hook. He counts that as a great service comedians can provide.
Why doesn't success make people lastingly happier?
Psychologists call the pattern hedonic adaptation, and the term "hedonic treadmill" comes from a 1971 essay by Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell. People tend to drift back to a baseline mood after good news, just as they do after bad news. In a 1978 study, Brickman, Dan Coates, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman compared lottery winners with a control group and found the winners were not significantly happier overall. Clinical depression is defined by a cluster of symptoms lasting at least two weeks in the DSM-5, the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic manual, and not by how a person's career is going.
How much of depression is chemistry?
The chemical explanation took hold in the 1960s, when researchers proposed that low levels of brain messengers such as serotonin and norepinephrine played a role. Researchers today describe depression as involving genes, stress, and the way brain circuits communicate, with chemistry as one piece. A 2000 meta-analysis of twin studies by Patrick Sullivan, Michael Neale, and Kenneth Kendler, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, estimated that genetics accounts for about 37 percent of the risk of major depression.
When did these famous people speak up publicly?
Terry Bradshaw went public with his clinical depression in the late 1990s, while he was working as a Fox NFL broadcaster. Bruce Springsteen described his own depressive episodes in his 2016 memoir Born to Run, including a severe stretch in his sixties. Michael Phelps spoke openly in 2018 about depression after the 2012 London Olympics, where he won four gold medals and two silvers. By the end of his career he held 23 Olympic golds, more than any other athlete.
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