The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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In the literature, this is called the "behavioral theory of depression" and it's supported by studies that suggest the behavioral components of psychotherapy -- like looking at maladaptive behaviors, setting goals, seeing how things that are satisfying in the short term actually distract from things that are more important in the long term -- are equally as effective as therapy with cognitive components. I tend to agree with this view, although daylight, physical exertion, and sometimes, yes, even thoughts can play a role. The "chemical imbalance" theory is obviously silly, but I would note that each person has a different tendency towards depressed states that has significant genetic factors, so obviously something biochemical has an influence.
I conceptualize depression as a "stuck" state, like a program trapped in a loop. Like you said, lots of things can "unstick" someone from that state: behavioral changes, deliberate changes in thought, removing yourself from an environmental condition that's causing stress, but also tweaking neurotransmitters or even just a shift in mindset from "I'm stuck" to "I'm going to be unstuck" can be enough to somehow break the cycle. To me, this explains why antidepressants work miracles for some people while doing little if anything for others; I think of antidepressants as "shake up the neurotransmitters" pills, and like a vending machine, sometimes a little percussive maintanence makes things work again -- and sometimes not. In particular, the blunting caused by antidepressants appears to help anxious people, and reducing someone's anxiety slightly might be enough to unstick them from the stuck state and get them moving again.
All of our treatments for depression are just varied ways of trying to shake things up enough that a patient will happen to become unstuck and fall into a positive feedback loop. IMO, that's why all forms of psychotherapy work about the same -- just for different people -- because we know the stuck state can exist but there's no agreement on what's actually going on psychologically or biochemically. Like you argue, it may be that depression is adaptive, but that modern lifestyles make it more likely to occur than is adaptive. It wouldn't be the first time!
It's depressing that psychology has so many entrenched schools all trying to fit the evidence into existing universal theories. It really does seem like everyone has a useful piece of the map (except for the guys who built an entire theory of the human mind out of the color print bars and some of the copyright logo).
Are there interdisciplinary efforts out there to reconcile this stuff, or do they not get supported?
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