depression is not an illness.

Depressed individuals demonstrate more accurate self-assessment and reduced susceptibility to common cognitive biases compared to non-depressed people showing optimistic distortions.

Depressed individuals engage significantly more in System 2 (slow, effortful, analytical) thinking compared to System 1 (fast, automatic, unconscious) processing dominant in non-depressed states.

Depressive rumination—obsessive analysis of past events, mistakes, and losses—functions as evolutionary learning mechanism enabling behavioral adaptation and future problem avoidance.

Anhedonia (loss of interest/pleasure) and associated physical fatigue result from physiological resource reallocation directing energy toward brain rumination rather than bodily activity.

Depression represents evolved adaptive response to life difficulties, functioning as psychological “immune response” preparing individuals for future challenges through forced learning rather than constituting illness.

Depression evolved for ancestral hunter-gatherer environments but malfunctions when applied to modern contexts—retail workers in suburbs, not savannah survival—creating dysregulated responses and treatment resistance.

Claiming “depression is good because it’s adaptive and natural” commits appeal to nature fallacy—incorrectly inferring goodness from natural origins or evolutionary function.