ABSTRACT
If the hackneyed “nature versus nurture” debate were applied to the causal history of clinical depression, we would on the one hand have an argument that some people are born depressed and on the other hand an argument that some people are made depressed by the environments they face or grow up in. While no researcher frames issues in this “either-or” way anymore, many would now agree that depression is at least in part the result of poor luck in the genetic lottery; some people, in other words, are born prone to depression, and the environment merely brings that tendency out in those people (see Platt and Bach 1997 for a discussion of nature versus nurture debates, questions, and common mistakes in psychology). Even those researchers who stress the role of “temperament” in depression make the link out to be direct. Some people, on this view, have temperaments that are “more sensitive,” either to environmental stresses or more generally, and these people end up depressed in large part because their temperaments predispose them to depression.
