[dazhengca]

If you haven’t read about them, you might find evolutionary approaches to depression interesting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_approaches_to_dep...

For me personally, these models offer much more explanatory power. We don’t have to always view depression as a mental illness.

[tgv]

> Some psychiatrists raise the concern that evolutionary psychologists seek to explain hidden adaptive advantages without engaging the rigorous empirical testing required to back up such claims.

That's putting it very mildly. Not that it's impossible that depression is an evolutionary trait, but that whole page is a bunch of highly contradicting, unprovable "this is deep" philosophy. It isn't even clear how to diagnose depression, what the underlying causes are, and if people were depressed 50,000 years ago. They all assume there has to be some benefit. There isn't a theory that argues it's just a negative effect of some other beneficial development. They don't even tell how developing depression could possibly positively affect procreation.

[Sakos]

Explanatory power is good if you're trying to understand where depression comes from. It's not helpful as a guide for clinical treatment of a person suffering depression right now.

[boffinAudio]

It also doesn't help sell high-profit pills to a gullible public desperate for anything that will make life seem better than it really is ..