[mjevans]

I only skimmed so I might have missed these points being discussed...

The 'mental immune system', which uses imagination to search for potential paths to classify likely future outcomes suffers from one very critical issue.

Selection bias / neural network (literal) training set problems. Repeated failures without success lead to the weight of that success against the failures skewing the prediction algorithm. Reality might or might not match the perceived lack of paths worth perusing, but the weight of that imagined failure against the slim odds of success surely also influences the ability to take the paths that could work even if they are discovered.

Repairing a biological entity's neural network for predicting future outcomes must surely also correlate with providing a 'good' feed of data to re-normalize expectations. My own theory and belief is that our evolutionary ancestors communities were small and 'depression' or other signs of distress resulted in this reconditioning; a social control rather than a directly biological one. Modern society seems to have broken that control loop and thus the situation becomes irreparable.

[ck425]

There's a lot of research to suggest that this is why kids from lower social-economic backgrounds have lower levels of self-control. They're so used to negative outcomes that they've been neurally trained to immediately take a positive outcome even if a more positive outcome would present itself if they waited.

The classic experiment is the cookie experiment, where the outcome is by resisting a plate of cookies they can have as many as they like but if they take one straight away they only get one. But it generalizes to many other outcomes too (not sure if outcome is the right word but you get what I mean?)

[acephal]

Are you saying talking to an encouraging family (encouraging being re-normalization) was the ancestral solution for depression?

[mjevans]

While Having family can be part of a solution (or a treading water situation), and lacking family could be part of the problem...

No, I chose the word __community__ for good reason.