After a few months feeling well, I'm experiencing depression again and your description is very fitting.

> I do like evolutionary explanations for a lot of human behavior, but this one feels a little too pat to me.

I agree.

> Patience, "biding our time", "hunkering down", etc. are actual emotional states we can experience and recognize, and depression doesn't feel even remotely like for most people as far as I'm aware.

But I don't think that's a valid counterargument. Depression doesn't need to feel like that or be motivated by that in order to be selected for. As long as it has the same effect as someone actively choosing to reduce consumption, the argument works. (Again, I'm still skeptical of the argument.)

> Also, this explanation would only really work if the entire group entered a dormant depressed state together.

That's valid, though to salvage the argument, you could say it applies to situations where active behavior turns out to be maladaptive. Perhaps fleeing the volcano causes you to inhale more gases and definitely die/fail to reproduce, whereas moping in place gives you a chance to luck out and be in the right place at the right times and thereby survive. That's a stretch, but the other examples are better: maybe the active people compete and kill each other off. Or the active people catch the plague while trying to help out.

Actively avoiding harm might even be the better approach 99% of the time, and yet the 1% where inaction is better means that the trait can survive. Say everyone has an innate x% chance of being active. Event 1: 60% of active people survive, 40% of inactive do. Repeat several times. Event N: the soldiers find and kill 100% of active people and 75% of inactive. The survivors will not have x=100.

Related example: dinosaurs and small mammals. Big things did really well until they didn't.

> On the contrary, when someone is depressed, the immediate response by people around them is generally try to "cheer them up" or encourage them to exit that depressed state.

True, but that is when times are generally good. I doubt people would be "cheer up" in an actual disaster situation.

From what i understand depressed people generally do well in disaster situations because they can still focus on critical tasks without getting overwhelmed by all the other bad stuff going on that isn't an immediate problem. (Possibly that's just a popular conception from movies. No idea if its true)

My understanding of the "modern" point of view is that selection acting at the level of the gene (not the organism or group) is sufficient as a theory. The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype go into this stuff in a lot of detail.

Totally agree with your first sentence though. And even if there is a plausible adaptive function it may have only been adaptive in the past, or might be a side effect of some other adaptive function (see sickle cell anemia), or a host of other possibilities.

I've often wondered if depression is exactly that, a system level optimization. Sometimes depression just happens, but sometimes it is triggered by low social status, realizing you've hurt someone in an unjustified or accidental way, having other mental illness, being seriously injured, or some other way that threatens the fitness of the overall group. Depression might be a (albeit flawed) system level way of reducing the amount of physical and social resources those people consume so that the non-depressed strata of society can better take them.

Note: this is a speculation, not assertions of fact

The rule of thumb is if something has a cost and persists over time it must have some benefit even if we don’t understand what that is. Otherwise, creatures not paying the cost will outcompete over time.

Elsewhere in the thread, people disagree. +1 to the reasons I suspect that what we call "depression" is actually several different things.

When asked to provide real life examples from the paper conclusion:

Workplace Example

Scenario: An employee has a colleague who tends to send aggressive emails if they don’t receive updates on time.

Healthy Active Avoidance: The employee learns, “If I send a quick status update every morning, I avoid the stress of hostile emails.” They adopt this as a habit.

Depressive Active Avoidance Deficit: A person with depressive symptoms may take longer to make this connection or fail to act even after realizing it. They know sending updates might help, but initiating the behavior feels too effortful or pointless. As a result, they keep receiving stressful emails, reinforcing the feeling of helplessness.

> ChatGPT, asked to translate to a high schooler: "Basically, this study found that young people with depression sometimes struggle to break automatic habits, especially when they’re trying to avoid something bad and there isn’t a prize or reward for doing it."

The translation is just as much of a word salad as the original, just with simpler vocabulary. Worse, it mangles the key point.

Prepotent responses aren't "automatic habits," but overriding responses (e.g. pain) [1]. The "sometimes" qualifier is unsubstantiated when describing "association". And the struggle isn't amplified ("especially") when avoiding something bad absent reward, the first part of the sentence is conditional upon the absence of a reward. (It's nonsense to say pool drownings are especially common in pools.)

[1] https://dictionary.apa.org/prepotent-response

> sometimes struggle to break automatic habits

The article claimed it is a failure to learn whereas the phrasing from ChatGPT results in a much wider implication. Failure in a struggle to do something could imply a moral failure. If that's the message people get from this research, then there's a real risk it could worsen depression.

Please don't post ChatGPT slop without then going through it with a fine-toothed comb, and checking whether it's correct. (It almost never is, but the criticism can be interesting… in discussion about ChatGPT. Otherwise, it's a derail.)