One Road Out of Depression

Just as the humans who eat too much sugar can more easily get type 2 diabetes, some humans who are exposed to 'X' can get mental diseases. (X is unknown or it varies). What if some humans are just more 'evolved' to live in the modern world than others?

10-12,000 years of living within dense populations, under despots, with periodic plagues, and in near constant war probably applies a lot of evolutionary selection pressures. Some of us whose ancestors were assimilated later probably have more genes that haven't been 'weeded out'.

I've read some research that human brain size has decreased over the last 100,000 years. The theory is that as humans began to become less independent, they had less need for certain types of brain functions. Since the brain is an extremely resource intensive organ, less brain means less energy requirements. So, humans quickly lose areas of the brain that are less necessary.

There are correlations between intelligence and depression. There are correlations between intelligence and sensory and spatial abilities. Maybe some of these things are related.

I also remember reading another article by someone in the field which explained it in terms of proximal and distal causes, which is basically about "different level[s] of abstraction" as tbrownaw in this thread puts it. Will link to it if I manage to find it.

Distal causes in depression's case maybe stuff like sleep deprivation, overstressed immune system, gut biome issues, etc. (and possibly genetic elements, who knows!) with little known about how they cause it or how they interact/overlap with one another.

The immediate proximal cause is, of course, the "chemical imbalance", which is popsci speak for neurotransmitter issues (among possibly others), a higher level proximal cause might be a life event that somehow causes some 'critical mass threshold' leading a spiraling avalanche (though again, little is known at the biological level about why this is so, assuming it is so.)

Some comments:

You might want to consider keeping track of the images and themes that come up in your dreams, and cross-reference them. When I did so, it helped me to recognize that my dreams have a sort of language that is spoken in symbols, and understanding the meaning of those symbols can help reveal what a dream is trying to communicate.

I believe that each person's dream symbols have meaning that is specific to that individual, though sometimes there are commonalities between people and even cultures. This is why I really hesitate to interpret anyone else's dream. Just because one symbol might mean something to me, or even to a lot of people doesn't mean it'll mean the same thing to the dreamer.

There are also ways of digging deeper in to the subconscious and fruitfully looking deeper in to the dream than what might appear on the surface. One well known technique is doing free association with anything and everything in the dream.

For example, if someone in a dream was wearing a black hat, what does that make you think of? Perhaps the first thing you think of is that the person in question is a bad guy. What else does it make you think of? Perhaps you recently saw someone wearing a black hat in waking life, or you know someone who usually wears a black hat. Or maybe you associate it with the Black Hat security conference, or with hackers, or with all of the above.

As you can imagine, every dream image or symbol has potentially infinite meanings, and often very personal ones. Investigating them like this can yield a lot of insight, and this can be done for every symbol in the dream. Even better results can come if you index and cross-reference all of these symbols and interpretations. Such record keeping can help you to remember that, for instance, a black-hat wearing person that you dreamt of last night also appeared in another dream a year ago, and studying those dreams together could help you make further connections that you might not have immediately thought of if you had not done this.

Another technique is having imaginal dialogues with or asking questions of the people or even objects in your dreams. That can help to, in a way, pick up dreaming where you left off, and to get more insight as to the role of something in the dream. Some people might object that since the dialogue is imagined it's not valuable. But, as Jung pointed out to a patient of his who after a long time revealed that all the dreams she told him she never had and simply made them up, they still come from the imagination and therefore are just as valuable as "real" dreams in understanding one's subconscious. Anyway, it's just another thing to try. Your mileage may vary.

Yet another technique is to imagine yourself in a situation from a dream you've had, and imagining what you would do in that situation, and 'dreaming it forward' as it were. Jung called this technique 'active imagination', and stressed that he thought it was critical that the person doing this should try to act in the imagination just as if he really were in the situation he imagined. This technique can make you even more in touch with your subconscious, especially if afterwards you analyze the imagined events just as if they'd been a dream.

On another note, I don't think it's really clear where dream contents come from. Some may say that it's obvious they come from one's self, and nothing else. But even if they do, what is the self? Many people have very different conceptions of the self. Some believe there is just the conscious self and nothing else -- the ego, as it were. Some believe one's self is nothing but the brain. Others believe there is a conscious and subconscious self. Some believe in a 'higher self', or even in many selves, etc. Jung thought archetypes were the sources of some dream contents, but he did not commit to saying what the source of the archetypes were, even leaving open the possibility that their sources were extra-personal (ie. outside the boundary of what is normally considered to be a particular human body and mind) such as gods or spirits -- one of the things that earned him the reputation for being a mystic. I don't believe in anything in particular myself, but do find it interesting to consider the possibilities, and generally find the simple reductionist view that everything's just a matter of physics in the brain to be unpalatable.