The opportunity theory of depression

Depression evolved as a way to reduce risk in environments lacking good opportunities

This young rhesus macaque in Kathmandu, Nepal, probably hopes for higher rank in the future. Wikimedia Commons.

When I was a teenager, between 13 and 20, I was depressed. Nothing unusual and nothing extreme. Just the ordinary low moods, self-hate, physical slowness and feeling of hopelessness.

But I didn't spend all those seven years in a low mood. Rather frequently I felt tinges of hope. On such occasions, my depressive state disappeared entirely and I became like a normal person. As long as I could uphold my hope of having found a decent opportunity to work toward a future, my depression disappeared completely.

Having spent seven years with on-and-off depression, I prepared for an entire life like that. Some people simply are mentally unstable and I was one of those, l guessed. It turned out not to be the case. As I got married, had children and moved to the countryside, my depressive symptoms vanished entirely, never yet to return (more about that in How I cured myself with evolutionary psychology).

This sharp turn-around in combination with the rapid on-off nature of my depression made me form a hypothesis: That normal-range depression is not a disorder, but an adaptation to a perceived lack of opportunity. Apparently, I wasn't depressed as a teenager because I'm a depressive person, but because I didn't see enough opportunities to be constructive. In order to act constructively, people need a vision to work toward. If working toward such a vision is impossible in the current environment, doing as little as possible until the environment changes is the best alternative. That way, the depressed individual saves energy and lowers risks. If there is nothing worthwhile to do anyway, doing as little as possible might be the best alternative.

The rank theory of depression

I formed that sketchy hypothesis almost two decades ago. Since then, I have been on the outlook for similar ideas. I didn't find anything until a few months ago when I stumbled over an idea called the rank theory of depression, explained in a book called Evolutionary Psychiatry - A New Beginning (1996) by psychiatrists John Price and Anthony Stevens. The rank theory of depression was originally developed by John Price in the 1980s. Price noticed that monkeys became uncommunicative following a competitive loss. Price meant that the behavior evolved in order to make the loser monkeys clearly signal lack of ambition. This should improve their chances to escape further conflict and adapt to their new lower status, Price theorized. He thought that the posture and demeanor of the monkeys looked similar to that of a depressed person.

John Price and Anthony Stevens interpreted human depression as a variety of monkey depression. While monkeys who have suffered an important loss display a body language of low self-confidence, humans with depression tend to say and think un-confident things like “I'm useless” and “everyone would be better off without me”. That way, ancestral humans who suffered a loss in rank were allowed to stay alive. If they were constantly demeaning themselves, the winner did not find them threatening.

The rank theory of depression clearly makes sense for monkeys. There is no reason to question the observation that monkeys show signs of depression when they lose rank. Also, human depression is likely to have its origins in monkey-style rank-loss depression. A condition that is as widespread as depression is likely to be old.

However, mostly I think that Price and Stevens exaggerate the similarities between monkey depression and human depression. There are indeed many humans who become depressed because they have lost social status, exactly like the monkeys. But far from all humans who are depressed have experienced such a loss.

There is more to human life than status

The number one problem with applying the rank theory of depression on humans is that most human societies actually do not explicitly rank their members. Instead, human social life revolves around the less rigid concept of social status. That might seem like a minor quantitative difference, but it makes a very important difference between human life and monkey life. For a monkey, rank is the thing with life. The one and big opportunity in monkey life is to rise in social rank. Monkeys don't build things, explore reality or engage in the arts. They just compete over who is the best monkey. The one big reason for a monkey to feel hopeful is the prospect of rising in rank. And thereby, the one big reason for a monkey to feel hopeless is the loss of social rank.

Human life definitely is about social status too. But not in the same simple, clear-cut way. For humans, the road to higher social status is more or less indirect. Competing openly over social status is looked down upon. The ideal human doesn't seek social status for the sake of it. The ideal human aims at doing something that benefits the common good. Social status is only supposed to be a well-earned reward for service to the community.

As everybody knows, this ideal is not reality in any human society. There are few things people complain about as much (not the least on Substack) as the discrepancy between this ideal and reality. The monkey-ish tendency to seek social status for the sake of it leads people to take short-cuts wherever short-cuts can be taken. That tendency lies at the root of most societal problems. But that doesn't mean that we are monkeys. It means that we are only halfway to our own ideals. Even though many humans are seeking to steal social status by unjust means, most humans are trying at least a little to take the long, laborious way to social status too.

Monkeys act depressed when they miss their one and only opportunity in life. Humans get depressed when they fail to see any of the many opportunities there can be in human life. For this reason, I think that the rank theory of depression would be more accurate if it was renamed the opportunity theory of depression.

The quest for unexchangeability

Then a simple question follows: What are humans actually seeking? If it is not higher rank pure and simple, what is it? Basically, I think it can be condensed into two points:

1. Being useful

2. Being liked and appreciated by people around - in other words, having that usefulness recognized and transformed into love, friendship and social status.

Different people care about those two points to different degrees. As previously mentioned, the people who care too much about point 2 and seek too much appreciation for too little usefulness are very much complained about. The scariest people are those completely outside the list - the psychopaths. They are said to care little about what normal humans care the most about, but to only seek the material and sensual rewards from love, friendship and social status. Another little-known group are the schizoids: People with schizoid personality disorder disproportionately care about what they themselves find is useful. They tend to be mysteriously uninterested in what other people think about them. That way, schizoid traits can make people strive hard at being useful (or what they themselves think is useful), but care little about the appreciation they get.

These extremes aside, people in the normal range have the above two goals: Being useful on different planes and being recognized as such. “Useful” must be interpreted in the wide range of the word. Humans wish to be desired on several plans: Intimate, familial, social, societal. A human being will not be satisfied with only being appreciated on a professional plan or for being useful for lowly tasks that no one else wants to perform. Humans want to be unexchangeable: Useful in a way that only they can be, here and now.

A quest for unexchangeability makes sense in an evolutionary perspective. An unexchangeable wife will not suddenly be replaced by a younger and prettier co-wife whose children get all the opportunities. An unexchangeable husband will not be cheated on, ridiculed, deserted and unable to find a new wife. An unexchangeable band member will be awarded their share of material and reproductive resources. An unexchangeable friend will be defended and warned of danger, also at some cost and risk.

So while monkeys seek higher rank, humans, who live in more complex societies, seek the status of unexchangeables in every area where they operate. The higher the risk of being exchanged, the more dangerous life becomes. In the wider meaning of the word, unexchangeability is a form of social status. But it is in the complex human sense of the word, where one and the same person has multiple levels of social status depending on circumstances. A person's social status rises and falls with the change of company and even with the change of conversational subject. While there are ways of simply being a better monkey, there are no ways of simply being a better human. Instead, humans carve out specialized niches for themselves.

The point of pain

I believe it is the failure to carve out such a niche that leads to most cases of depression among humans. Typically, people get depressed when it seems to them that what they are doing will not lead them to the level of success they hope for and they can see no other alternatives.

I don't say that all cases of depression are caused by a perceived lack of opportunity. Humans can feel physical pain for no reason at all, even in body parts that are no longer there. Then it should be entirely possible for humans to feel psychological pain for no reason at all as well.

However, most physical pain is a signal: Whatever you are doing that causes this, stop it. It wouldn't be strange if most psychological pain was of the same nature: A signal telling the individual that a change of circumstances would be a good idea.

In an ancient environment, individuals who didn't feel competent or appreciated, or both, and who didn't make a good subsistence, had very good reasons to do something differently so they would become competent and appreciated. In situations when they saw no opportunities for that, doing as little as possible might have been the best alternative: Instead of provoking the people who think you are of little use, just put yourself in waiting mode instead. If socializing can't lead to valuable alliances, then social withdrawal is the low-risk option. A depressed person is doing the bare minimum, because there is not much upside to doing things anyway. There are only risks. That way, depression is a kind of social freezing until better times.

This, I think, is what teenagers tend to suffer from. They have little status to lose to begin with. Instead, they despair over the lack of constructive things to do here and now in order to work towards a status of exchangeability. And adults are not that much better off, either. On a material level, capitalism has brought great wealth. But the price for that wealth is that we have been explicitly reduced to exchangeable units, valued in numbers. The more of human life that is reduced to numbers that way, the more exchangeable we become.

Group evolution, group depression

Things are a bit more complicated still. As with most things in human evolution, group selection has played a part.

Roughly, kin selection is what prevents us from all being psychopaths. And group selection is what prevents us all from being Machiavellan nepotists. Without group selection, people maximizing their own social status at the expense of everything else will always win. Group selection made most, or at least some people, crave to be genuinely useful.

But it also made people crave to be members of successful groups. People not only crave appreciation from their group members, but also high status for their groups as such. And they are quite flexible as to which group to claim adherence. For example, in the first half of the 20th century, workers sometimes identified with their nations, sometimes with their religions and sometimes with their status as workers. In particular socialists clearly saw the competition and tried to persuade their followers that the two rivals were irrelevant and even harmful. Whatever the merits and vices of religion, nationalism and socialism, they certainly acted as antidepressants in their heyday (and judging from statistics¹, it seems like religion still might do that).

This takes us to the question of the many depressed teenagers. “Teenagers” as such are a rather new group. According to Wikipedia, the word teenager became established first in the 1940s. It appears that as long as teenagers participated in the struggle for subsistence together with adults, they counted themselves more into categories shared across age groups than into an age-based category between childhood and adulthood.

That changed when society got rich enough to exclude teenagers from the labor market. When faced with this supposedly great favor, the immediate reaction from the teenagers was to start a revolt. After having worked quite dutifully since the beginning of time, teenagers now actively sought to define themselves as separate from, and even in opposition to, adults. As soon as “teenagers” became a recognized group, its members felt the need to defend the status of that group. Especially as society at large showed charity rather than respect for teenagers: The reason why teenagers needed to go to school instead of working was that they were too uneducated and immature to be let out in society - hardly a great measure of respect. Teenagers answered by organizing into subcultures that disrespected grown-ups and their virtues in return.

Teenagers collectively revolted in order to escape collective depression due to their low social status. And society at large answered through spending enormous resources on quenching the revolt, mostly with soft and expensive methods: Supervision, bribes and appropriation of teenage culture. Step by step, every cultural expression that teenagers developed in order to state their superiority was either repressed or, more often, moved in under adult supervision and thereby effectively defanged.

The arrival of smartphones put the cap stone on decades of work to pacify teenagers: It puts them in an imaginary world where they keep calm and cause little obvious, immediate damage to themselves and others. Teenagers are now finally not a rebellious group, but a vanquished group. And as is logical for vanquished creatures: Their mood is depressed.

1. Noah T Kreski, Qixuan Chen , Mark Olfson, Explaining US adolescent depressive symptom trends through declines in religious beliefs and service attendance, 2023 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8840960/