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How is depression evolutionarily advantageous? It doesn't spur change, it just makes you want to curl up into a ball. How is thst helpful?(USER WAS WARNED FOR THIS POST, You should always elaborate on your opinions rather than just spilling the soykaf.)

Who said it's helpful?

>>77934 Why does the brain do it if it isn't helpful ?

Look into group evolution. Not every selective pressure improves the individual but also the population. Reason we have emotions, facial expressions, empathy and so on. All things that help the tribe to organize and thrive. Some of that will benefit a sole member but some of it will be an indicator for sickness or them being a complete failure and seeking solitude in such a state helps keep the others free from germs and potential loser genes. Now is this fallible? Yes, sure. But has it worked more often than not? That appears to have been the case.

>>77933 It doesn't have to be, it can just be arbitrarily bad, since the mind is a whole system and not a collection of independent upgrades. Fix one thing, it probably breaks something else. Our brains are a collection of random bullshit that happens to be good enough to basically work in most circumstances, that doesn't mean they do not have bugs, especially when we are placed in unnatural environments that don't suit our instincts.

>>77938 You're correct that the human body is the biological equivalent to eons of legacy spaghetti code built on top of each other. But its this blind but relentless purely trial and error development that got us this far and allowed our species to survive hundreds of thousands of years, and the proto humans we derived from even longer. Only in the last couple centuries, which aren't even a blink of an eye compared to that it has grown to be a burden due to constant inflammation from terrible food and the constant invocation of the fight or flight response causing permanent stress and interpersonal relationships being more fleeting due to us not depending on a tribe of less than 50 people in order to survive but also higher competition and thus high expectations which are often not met or their failures masked as we see through social media. I could go on but I believe that this sufficiently illustrates my point that these are all sources of depression that appear to be a bug in contrast to a changed environment, and that this appears to warrant such ideas as to get everyone hooked on soma like in the Brave New World. But >>77936 is the reason why depression has been evolutionary advantageous and this is what OP asked. Nature doesn't keep around dead weight lightly and with the considerable prevalence of depression this couldn't have been a fluke. But hey, new circumstances cause new selective pressures, however what I'm currently seeing is that what's favored now is psychopathy until it causes for everything to fall apart again and we're back to tiny tribes in a post nuclear wasteland.

Evolution isnt all about advantages. Evolution isnt intelligent design. As long as something doesnt eliminate genes from passing on it wont go away. But there is some advantages, a person in a depressed state may be thinking more negatively and this means they can pick up on dangers more, same with anxiety

>>77941 >I could go on but I believe that this sufficiently illustrates my point that these are all sources of depression that appear to be a bug in contrast to a changed environment I don't see how this would contribute to the argument that depression is a product of its evolutionary advantages, because if us + modern circumstances = depression, evolution wouldn't have had much time to account for that at all and probably did not. I think >>77936 doesn't really make sense, and also that there does not need to be an explanation for why depression implies reproductive fitness somehow, it probably just doesn't. Chaos is real, not everything serves a purpose.

>>77933 I think hindsight reasoning trying to justify everything as evolution is nonsense but if you insist of finding meaning its fight or flights third option: wait it out.

>>77943 >>77944 >us + modern circumstances = depression, evolution wouldn't have had much time to account for that No soykaf, but this is also not what I've said. Instead I agreed with >>77938 that in current circumstances, depression appears arbitrary and ill fit for our civilization. But it wasn't so for the hundreds of thousands of years which preceded the industrial revolution as there seems to have been a real advantage for individuals to become reclusive, thus avoiding contact with other tribe members, and lethargic, so not to exert too much strength, if something is wrong with them. This would reduce the spread of diseases and chances for less successful genes to remain in that group's gene pool. That, although not for the individual but only for everybody else, sounds like an advantage. That today's society now wrongfully triggers that mechanism doesn't invalidate why it initially emerged. And sure, there's ofc chaos at play. Natural selection isn't this grand infallible algorithm, nor did I claim so. But while single occurrences are likely due to mere chance, repeated occurrences are plausibly due to some mechanism at play. This view does not require "intelligent design" but natural selection does not affect single specimen either. If it did, we would be all psychopaths but there's a game theory to life which renders groups which can organize, emphatize between its members and quickly sort out burdens, to be more fit for survival than other more disorganized ones. Again, I'm not saying everything is 100% deterministic, I'm not so please think about this in better detail before replying, but there is a pattern. Depression is too consistent to just be a random chance that emerged in the past 100 years, but rather it's more likely that it is a mechanism which emerged due to it providing a protective function to a group during more technologically primitive conditions. Depression is simply too frequent of a phenomenon and too deeply ingrained in our physiolog than for it to just be something that came out of nowhere due to some roll of a dice some hundred years ago. Instead depression is likely something that emerged long, long before recorded history due to solving a problem better at the time and this I believe is answering OP's question even if that advantage isn't as present any more or even being overshadowed by the detrimental effects of it during a wage slave's lifestyle.

Being depressed is a logical reaction in this declining and depraved society, which demands that you submit yourself and give up your integrity to be a slave to the all-devouring machine.

>>77946 There isn't really evidence depression is an illness per say. It can simply just be people more sensitive or more lingering in their thoughts. So depression could be a consequence of having emotions and having emotions likely is something crucial to conscious sentience, at least for mammals. Or lingering on emotions might be a part of higher intelligence which would explain the higher rates of depression among people better educated, setting aside stresses of higher education as one factor. Not to say intelligence is formal education, just that is where studies lie is that and IQ.

>depression is an illness I implore you to read and try to understand, what I wrote since I don't remember having claimed that. Nor how that would even be relevant against what I stated. At least outside of clinical depression which is often caused by some dopamine balance. In that case it very much is an illness, or rather a symptom thereof. But then you ought to wonder why a low baseline of reward chemicals would yield such a reaction? And why a normative body consistently would fall into this debilitating state from pain, sickness, seeing oneself at the bottom of the social ladder or any sort of hopelessness? It can't be just because of high intelligence, though as you can see I can relate to a sort of depressed feeling from a constant frustration of getting my thought across only to repeatedly get misunderstood. But even animals can display a behavior which resembles depression as it occurs in humans. Stupid people get depressed too if they're made aware of not being able to keep up with their smarter peers. And while there is something like a melancholy which for instance hopeless romantics tend to fall into solely due to the inner workings of their mind, it's also not what I was talking about. But the very consistent reaction to sadness, setbacks and perception of low self worth. If we're already down, why would our psychology kicks us even more while we're on the ground? You'd think this would have been such a detrimental disadvantage that it would have been sorted out long ago since depressed people rarely score as well as confident ones do. And while sure, there are such side effects from our higher intelligence (compared to the rest of the animal kingdom) like us musing ourselves with things like philosophy even though it has no greater advantage to our survival. But also it isn't as detrimental as falling into this crippling state of lethargy and other reduced functionality. Our brains don't consume too much energy either since that gets sorted out by natural selection too. Or difficulties during birth when the head is too massive, etc. So why do we have this mechanism if it doesn't bring benefits? And the hypothesis that I believe makes the most sense is again, a bodily reaction to something going wrong where we instinctively seek distance to others in order to not endanger them while we attempt to heal. If you think in terms of group evolution, this makes great sense just like other things like emotions. Love and holding a grudge for instance would be pointless if we didn't adapt to live in collectives and cooperate with other specimen of our kin. Even selflessness makes evolutionary sense since if you die protecting your relatives from danger, something very close to your genetics still gets to live on. Anyway, please make sure to have read this carefully this time since I tried to make distinctions between multiple types of depression and melancholy. But to reiterate quickly, I'm talking of depression that is the typical reaction to something negative which appears to have some evolutionary purpose. But that said, while I also implied but probably need to state explicitly is that while I believe that to be the most likely case, it doesn't mean that I think you should feel depressed whenever life gives you lemons or you're dissatisfied with your job or what ever. But rather tried to explain the possible source of that psychological mechanism as this is what I believe OP asked here. Instead you should check if you've got any inflammation going on, or if you're overly stressed or need to reconcile with your feelings or reprioritize your life etc. Maybe something like cognitive behavior therapy might help but whatever it is, you'd have to figure out and address the trigger for your depression in order to "cure" it. I hope I was able to be more clear this time.

>>77950 >Maybe something like cognitive behavior therapy might help but whatever it is, you'd have to figure out and address the trigger for your depression in order to "cure" it. I hope I was able to be more clear this time. I already know the reason for my depression. It's called being autistic, or having Asperger's more specifically. No amount of shrooms or therapy will help me because I already know why I'm depressed. If I take shrooms, they will only show me that I'm an autistic loser. When I went to therapy, I was told that I'm autistic and there's nothing I can do about it, so here we are.

It could also have some perceptible benefits to an individual. I remember hearing one possible benefit of depression evolutionary being that if a person was faced with some insurmountable obstacle in their life, say they are a male, and there is another stronger male persecuting them, taking the women, and they're powerless against him, they would otherwise continue fighting against that stronger male unless they are rendered inactionable through a depression, from whence time will pass and an opportunity could arise for him to strike upon the stronger male, or the trouble the stronger male causes him passes for some other reason. It serves to keep someone alive at the very least in the face of an insurmountable obstacle and could give them a chance to reproduce, or keep their offspring alive.

>>77933 >>77935 Depression protects people from the illusion of control. If people thought they had control over every aspect of their lives, they would make stupid decisions assuming they can control the situation they are in, even if they can't.

Depression is a dysfunction caused by the modern environment, it's not a feature. Look into Brain Energy.

>>77954 Most of those delusional people have good lives. Especially narcissists. The "fake it till you make it" mentality works for them in life.

>>77967 can confirm I have come across a couple of these people, the reality is its more a danger and an issue with themselves if you keep your distance correctly. The sad reality is its just another way for these people to cope with reality. there "this is because the friend is, as the translation has it, ‘our own ideal image’. We envisage the friend as such. And this is how he envisages us: with a friendly look. Cicero uses the word exemplar, which means portrait but also, as the exemplum, the duplicate, the reproduction, the copy as well as the original, the type, the model. The two meanings (the single original and the multipliable copy) cohabit here; they are – or seem to be – the same, and that is the whole story, the very condition of survival. Now, according to Cicero, his exemplar is projected or recognized in the true friend, it is his ideal double, his other self, the same as self but improved. Since we watch him looking at us, thus watching ourselves, because we see him keeping our image in his eyes – in truth in ours – survival is then hoped for, illuminated in advance, if not assured, for this Narcissus who dreams of immortality. Beyond death, the absolute future thus receives its ecstatic light, it appears only from within this narcissism and according to this logic of the same." - Jacques Derrida The Politics Of Friendship These types of people are very status seeking they will find some way to aggrandize themselves through you, stay away..... FAR away.

It's not. But IMO depression isn't evolutionary behaviour. In fact, a person may have depression because they're chronically in a situation which is far outside their evolutionary parameters. Or because social or biochemical (pollution-related) malformation. We did not evolve to live as we do, and it leads to many problems, including depression.

here's the benefit: its a safety mechanism. Literally just play dead animals do when in danger - you do nothing waiting it out. Like think of a guy divorce raped. The right think to do would be to murder both judge and bitch. Obviously that would cause major issues though so he falls back into a do nothing protocol.

>>77967 We are a communal species. As such any individual who abuses our group systems because he has the mental capacity to do it will succeed. There's only so many that the system can take at once, but it has enough robustness to take a certain amount at all times.

>>77954 This. Self Awareness was matter of life and death back then, retreat to the minor signs of inner discommodity until the things get better was a survival strategy.

>>77954 >Depression protects people from the illusion of control. Wonderful protection the ends up killing yourself. I'd say God's blessing, not less. Let's praise DEPRESSION. Let's love LAIN

>>80178 horseshoe crabs get hunted and milked in factories for their blood. So they too are fuarrrked by human evolution.

>>80186 It's the genes that are preserved, not individual organisms. >>80190 Too quick of a change for evolution to respond

>>80186 Depression =/= Suicidal tendencies Depression merely lowers the burden of suicidal tendencies to stop you from doing it. People who realize meaninglessness often cannot operate in a world without meaning, which drives them to suicide. It isn't depression that does it, since depression only lifts the veil of fake meaning and control. What you decide to do with that is on you. You can find your own meaning, and restore hope without being tainted by the world, or you can give up to despair, decide your life has no meaning and you have no desire to live and loose your fear of death. >According to the theory, the simultaneous presence of thwarted belongingness and perceived burdensomeness produce the desire for suicide. While the desire for suicide is necessary, it alone will not result in death by suicide. Rather, Joiner asserts that one must also have acquired capability (that is, the acquired ability) to overcome one's natural fear of death.

>>80209 >depression only lifts the veil of fake meaning and control Which kind of depression are you talking, exactly? Give a definition? Because that seems to diverge with clinical description of a depression.

>>80211 That's because clinical depression only addresses categorization of the symptoms, not the reasoning for those symptoms. The DSM 5 literally just says being depressed is depression, or loss of interest and pleasure or sadness for 2 weeks straight. Depression is literally just a mindset. You may not like it, but it's the truth Present Day, Present Time! AHAHAHAHAHA! >The new umbrella review – an overview of existing meta-analyses and systematic reviews – published in Molecular Psychiatry, suggests that depression is not likely caused by a chemical imbalance, and calls into question what antidepressants do. Most antidepressants are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), which were originally said to work by correcting abnormally low serotonin levels. There is no other accepted pharmacological mechanism by which antidepressants affect the symptoms of depression. From another study >“If we don’t expect improvement from the continuous use of these medications, then the correct decision might be to stop the continuous use of these medications,” he said, or to add another kind of treatment, like cognitive behavioral therapy, which aims to change people’s thought patterns. >Yet pills are often easier and cheaper: It can be hard for people to access therapy because there aren’t enough providers, and mental health treatments often aren’t fully covered by insurance.

Too many emotional words have been used. There doesn't have to be a benefit (increased reproduction rates) to a offset a percieved deficit (the social suicide that is depression). "Evolution" doesn't care about dead weight, or being inefficient. The language used to describe it is so charged with emotion I honestly think people are more deluded after hearing its use in common media. I often see it boiled down to: survival of the fittest. This is interpreted as social "good". Nature doesn't give a fuarrrk if you're sentient, enjoying life, or so 'distressed' you off yourself at any day. To give a plausable, "horid" explanation: depressed women are easier to rape and produce more offspring than nondepressed women. Depression sometimes expressing itself in male offspring is doesn't matter, as the promiscuity of nondepressed males pulls the slack. Evidence: studies say more women seek help with depression than men. All the depressed women I know have children. Checkmate athiests

Also, you're asking a question with the assumption it has an answer, and that answer should be human comprehensible as rational. Giant assumptions which I don't think can be proven. Another theory: evolution has created a creature such that the creatures create an enviornment that it is primatively compelled to create, but that creation causes the extinction of their species. So the much shallower assumption is: depression IS a positive mutation and not a negative, in terms of progeny. Imagine a race of people being born who experience a constant state of supreme pleasure having their water and food needs met. No sexual proclivities at all. By all measurements of human qualitative assessment: theyre the happiest people in the universe. They'll likely go extinct sooner than later.

here's food for thought: heavy anti-depressiva is linked to committing heavy crime.

DEPRESSION - Deep Rest for your Organism.

a call to retrieve into one's unconscious. in a neopositivist culture, mass depression, - collective call to return to one's spirit

>>77933 >How is depression evolutionarily advantageous? It doesn't spur change, it just makes you want to curl up into a ball. How is thst helpful? It makes you slow down and be more cautions when you are vulnerable for some reason.

Firstly, evolution is not "survival of the fittest" like you've been told, it would be better described as "survival of the good enough to reproduce". Secondly, most of evolution is actually just random minutiae which has no positive or negative effect on survival or reproduction, and is simply dispersed through a community due to random chance. Thirdly, even if none of the prior facts were true, humans don't live in the environment for which we evolved, meaning the stresses we deal with now are not the ones we evolved to be good at dealing with. An easy example of this is that for our entire evolutionary history until very recently, calorie dense foods were rare and valuable, so it was in our best interests to eat as many of them as possible. Now, we live in a world where calorie dense foods are overabundant, and therefore we have problems with obesity. To extend this line of thinking a little bit, you're starting with a flawed subject. You're conceiving of the brain as able to be separated out and isolated from it's environmental and social context, subject only to it's own internal design via evolution, when such a thing does not exist. In reality, we live in a set of social and material conditions which play as much of a role in shaping our internal subjectivity as the physical structures of the brain do.

>>77933 it's not. the mainstream calls it an illness for a reason. sepsis isn't evolutionarly advantageous either. our immune responses and our emotions are driven by machines, fallible machines. if you've got a cog missing, or something that finds its way into the machine has enough force or even just the right shape to knock one loose, the machine can break down. it has nothing to do with your brain trying to eugenicize itself and its not a superpower.

Everyone is traumatized by this horrible society. Those who admit it are labeled "depressed" and blamed, or told they have a "random illness unrelated to their experience".

Remember that life doesnt exist the way it does because it is the most advantageous form for the survival of each individual species, advantageous traits for survival are just in a very understandable and causal way what is most likely to be passed down and survive and spread. Also remember too that there is group dynamics at play and things that are individually not strictly advantageous can overall be advantageous on the whole and thus still spread as the broader gene pool containing this trait is more successful even though said trait would be extremely disadvantageous for some lone wolf like animal. I dont think we know exactly for sure why humans can develop depression in part because there is many reasons someone can be. Being able to become depressed is a (mostly) universal human feature but as to why some chronically do or do to the point of suicide I think these are mostly viewed as "side effects" of the way our brains and nervous system work. Again not every bit of everything is geared for survival, the way our brain works in large is very successful and its possible whatever redevelopment would have had to happen to ensure no one can devlop something like MDD would have required a step backwards. Some rats teeth never stop growing and can grow so long it prevents them from eating and they die, but a rat whos teeth stops growing will wear its teeth down first and thus accomplish far less in terms of finding food and nest building and getting around. curling up into a ball and doing nothing can be advantageous when things are very bleak, harsh winter and war and such. The fact that this nifty feature can misfire in situations where things should be okay is the byproduct of a million systems and neuroplasticity all of which are what allow humans as a whole to be so flexible. You could imagine it would require throwing out the baby with the bathwater so to speak for it to simply "not happen".

Depression is a natural response telling you something in your life may be hazardous to you and is result of having emotions which themselves are critical for higher thought. Suicide is just the bad end outcome.

"Evolution" is just a bullshit justification for the status quo. People claim nonsense and mistakes "actually make sense" because they wouldn't be able to exist if they didn't. People are unwilling to admit mistakes happen and that corruption exists in all things.

>>84681 evolution is try everything and see what works. Often that produces babies who dont even make it to birth. If it lives then circumstances determine good/bad not the trait itself. Like sickle-cell lowers performance but it makes you immune to malaria.

>>77936 This. Weird that it was the best post and then everyone goes on to type trash bullshit in all the later comments. People that are a burden on the group should be removed. People with unwanted genes need to be removed. Depression is a mechanism for this.

>>84682 Do you really think it's normal for people to be infertile and unable to bear living children? You're just justifying the status quo. People are extremely sick and unhealthy today, poisoned constantly from all sources, and bloodlines have been massively corrupted.

you would not survive a month in eastern europe

>>84685 Where did i mention normal? I clearly wrote try everything including deadly defects. Whatever survives gets to exist and sometimes its beneficial. That's all there is to it. Secondary the meta for states is creating obedient worker drones like an ant hive because if everyone is smart then nobody will go die on command in a war. Its simply the meta gameplay. And in addition people went soft and decided to save everyone so now you have a growing number of hereditary defects passed on with the help of medicine & welfare keeping them alive.

Harking back to what other people have said - evolution isn't about making the "perfect" organism. It's just whatever it can for the next generation to survive. We must not put human thought and ideals behind evolution - it is an inherently random process, and we are in no ways "designed". Many mental quirks you see today are probably all stemming from complex behaviors with your cognitive abilities (which might of evolved quite recent in the grand scheme of things) and your environment.

Wikipedia has some interesting theories not present in this thread for anyone interested. I need to start demonstrating the epistemological humility to read the wikipedia page for anything I think I know everything about, and especially anything that puzzles me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_approaches_to_depression The "behaviors under a socially hostile environment" part of the third ventricle hypothesis section seems very intuitive, but I don't understand the relation to the anatomy. If depression is directly caused by shame and lack of allied peers, can you think your way out of depression by comprehending the existence (however remote) of all the people who would be loyal friends to you if they knew your nature truly? (and vice versa)

How is cancer evolutionarily advantageous? Or cleft palate? Or Down's syndrome? Or schizophrenia? Or any other disease or birth defect? Or maybe they aren't?

>>84792 Isn't cleft palate caused by FAS fetal alcohol syndrome? People love evolution because it's a thought terminating cliche, they don't have to think about the consequences of their actions. Instead they can think "it's just random genetics lol", "it's normal that people are suffering all these weird diseases, nothing can be done".

>>84827 Some things are absolutely largely genetic and seemingly impossible (for now) but I agree overall that reducing everything down to "its just evolution" is totally thought terminating. Ultimately it doesnt even matter in the cases it is true, then it just comes down to how can we change it or work around it. We have "defied" or done more than what evolution or biology strictly dictated for centuries because it really did not that strictly dictate anything and we evolutionarily developed a brain that can resolve more issues than we cane out of the womb with.

>>84827 >"it's normal that people are suffering all these weird diseases, nothing can be done" Funny how it has become normalized to be sick and reliant on pills just to be able to live these days. You go to a doctor and he just gives you pills that you will have to take for the rest of your life, instead of addressing the actual root cause.

A lot recurring diseases or inflammatory symptoms are due to a polluted digestive track. Specific colon-detox is considered quackery by some and miraculous by others, with testimonies recalling of things flushed out of the body after a few weeks of strictly following the method which are either gross or scary. A form of poisoning my elements that can remain stuck inside for as far as decades.