It's not that I'm depressed, per se. Not clinically, that is. I'm just sort of psychologically depressed. It is perhaps my body's way of informing me that there is something wrong with the way I am living.
Normally, bodily responses take the form of pain or other stimulus for short-term notification; i.e. YOU ARE BEING DAMAGED turns into pain. When you feel a nice crunchy bit of pain, reflexes take over and your body tries to find out, in the shortest time possible, what the fuck's
going on.
This brings me to a tangent which I would like to digress upon: the conciousness. Why is it that the "id" sits inside the brain, yet has no control of it? It retains the control of the basest bodily functions, like movement of most muscles. Unfortunately, it gives up most of it's ability to detect what is going on inside of itself. Is this the tradeoff for high intelligence? Is this what happens because we have enough neural cells to have self-awareness?
And why is it called self awareness if it limits our ability to be aware of our "selves" in a purely physical sense?
What this boils down to is the idea that we sit in our brains as two creatures. One creature, we've given a name to. That would be "you"... John Smith or whatever your name is. The other creature is much more base. It has about the intelligence of a rat. It knows how to avoid pain and knows how to control all of it's cells. But it cannot think, except to the extent that it can recieve orders from the id, the creature with a name.
So, back to my original thought, depression. Depression is normally thought to be felt by the id first, through unfortunate social conditions, and then from there out into psychosomatic pain in the rest of the body if pain proceeds in that fashion.
But what if the other creature, whom I shall call the "host", feels the depression first?
Depression might be the manifestation in the id of another sort of signal from the host, just as pain is the id's representation of the host's "YOU ARE BEING DAMAGED". Depression might be the id's representation of "YOU ARE FAILING SOCIALLY". But this would mean that the host functions socially. This is already suspected to some
extent because of baser instincts like reproduction - the host has the drive to continue the species, which may form a basic social conciousness (through the use of senseable signals on other people when aroused, for example, like pheromones). But if this social conciousness is developed to the extent that it causes a stimulus in the brain when one's social life is miserable, it may mean that man truly is a social animal.
Pain, then, caused by depression, would not be psychosomatic in the normal sense. It would simply be the host trying to convince the id that something is wrong through another channel, with the reason that "id's not listening on this channel, maybe i'll have to tell him some
other way". But why does the host care if the id has a good social life, unless the host needs that social life too?
This brings the main point: the host body must need a social life too. A social life, specifically interactions with other people, is known to be good for a person. Perhaps, then, the host knows this, and tries to make sure one occurs, by stimulating adverse side-affects if a social life is not happening. The host, after all, is affected by the id's actions.
Of course, this theory fails because of the supreme irony that depression itself is a feedback loop; whenever a person is depressed, it is far easier for them to stay home and do nothing and get more depressed than it is for them to get up and go somewhere. | 
