Evolutionary Causes of Depression

I read an interesting article hypothesizing an evolutionary cause for depression which stated that depression is a state people get in which is conducive to intent thinking and personal change. There's more to it than that and I suggest you read the article in full because it's quite good.

Having been depressed off and on for quite some time, i'd say that theory is imperfect, but as with all theories of psychology, they're applicable only to a generalized description of the disorder, so it still may hold water.

I was thinking about evolutionary causes for depression, and while I preface this with the giant asterisk of "since you can't really prove something like this, it could be just about anything", I still think it's interesting, if not morbid.

What if depression is a state of mind evolved to sort of say "shit or get off the pot"? Being depressed certainly brings about different patterns of behavior. Some are so painful and disparaging that the only way out is through a cathartic change of lifestyle. Some people simply fluctuate out of depressive states, some people change their lives to get out of depressive states, some people never leave their depressive states, and more often than not, those who cannot or do not ever leave their depressive states, take their own lives.

Could it be that depression is a means of either forcing people to improve their live or remove themselves from the gene pool? Again, this is a pretty morbid though, but while it's difficult to come up with true comparisons to a human psyche, there is plenty of self terminating behavior in computing. Competing threads may be automatically terminated if they are in a deadlock. anti-virus software isolates, quarantines, and destroys malignant software. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that humans have evolved their own sinister way of weeding out the unproductive.

Again, this is a generalized statement too, and i'll remind you, based on nothing but introspective experiences. There are a plethora of psychological ailments which probably have nothing to do with a normally functioning brain. True chemical imbalances like those brought on by under active endocrine systems, genetic defects such as trisomies, and brain damage from traumatic events are certainly not something evolution has chosen for. But within the realm of Major Depression discussed in this article, I think this is a interesting thought.

(Article):http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=depressions-evolutionary