[mhardcastle]

Here is a lecture by Robert Sapolsky, an extremely well-regarded researcher, that goes over some evidence on depression being a disease: https://youtu.be/NOAgplgTxfc

It's been a while since I've seen it, but I recall his evidence including some rather striking non-behavioral symptoms, like changes in sleep cycles.

To address your specific thoughts on it, his position (paraphrased from memory) is that social stressors like you describe cause elevated cortisol, which causes depression - such that your position that "modern life really sucks" is not incompatible with a biological cause.

It's extraordinarily interesting in a lot of other ways - definitely worth a watch in spite of the length.

[NickM]

Oh yeah, certainly, being depressed is correlated with all kinds of changes in biology. I'm not saying it's like "just in your head", but the question is, do those changes lead to being depressed or does being depressed lead to biological changes?

Of course that question is an oversimplification since the answer is certainly some of both; but the prevailing wisdom seems to be that it's mostly/all biological changes leading to feeling depressed, whereas I'm not convinced the scales don't lean more in the other direction, at least on average.

EDIT: but as to your point about stress leading to elevated cortisol levels, to me that's clearly not a biological cause. The cause is stress, and the elevated cortisol levels are an effect of the stress. It's not like the hormone levels just went up all by themselves due to some genetic abnormality or something; if they did, then yeah maybe that's a biological disease that warrants some kind of chemical correction, but that's not at all what we're talking about.

[awaythrow483]

If you had crippling anxiety because someone actually was trying to kill you, don't you think you'd have changes in your sleep cycles? Why does that have to indicate some change that is based purely on chemical imbalances that are not caused by external factors?