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"Perhaps diminished activity and a more general inclination to hide is part of what might, in some circumstances, be an adaptive response to being abandoned and unprotected in a world of unknown threats?"

...in other words, the symptoms of depression make sense, signify, embody an individual's lived narrative or story-in-the-making. The body communicates the internal experience, signals to the self and to others that something is amiss.Hence, symptoms can be thought of as useful, something to attend (i.e., pay attention) to rather than to treat. Messengers from the unconscious? "Screaming" to be heard? Or perhaps messengers from the collective unconscious, insofar as one's experience is embedded in and shaped by one's sociopolitical context?

I bring this up because I enjoy the idea of accepting and inquiring into rather than fighting against symptoms. It also nicely challenges the notion that depression is a 'mental illness.' Was prompted to dig up an article I read back in college by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock, critical medical anthropologists both, who in 1987 published an article entitled "The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology" [Medical Anthropology Quarterly, New Series, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Mar., 1987), pp. 6-41]. I remember being struck me at the time I first read it, and I find it continues to make my brain glow. They propose a model of "three bodies," "three perspectives from which the body may be viewed: (I) as a phenomenally experienced individual body-self; (2) as a social body, a natural symbol for thinking about relationships among nature, society, and culture; and (3) as a body politic, an artifact of social and political control" (6). They further suggest that emotion may be the common link between these bodies, "[i]nsofar as emotions entail both feelings and cognitive orientations, public morality,and cultural ideology" (28). To better explain, let me offer a few direct quotes rather than attempt to paraphrase: