Depression presents a core paradox. Extremely heterogeneous triggers ranging from genes to social stress converge upon a highly coordinated phenotypic constellation. This pattern spans species, has been conserved for hundreds of millions of years, and lacks consistent evidence of structural damage. Is this a system malfunction, or an activated functional program?To resolve this paradox, we developed the Programmatic Feature Index (PFI) as a black-box inference tool, quantifying the strength of evidence for programmatic nature across three dimensions: input heterogeneity, output coordination, and cross-species conservation, with exitability serving as independent validation. Computation across 56 biological phenomena reveals that depression falls into the high-PFI group, alongside recognized programs such as sleep and vomiting.If depression is a program, why does it manifest as pathology? We propose that depression is a programmatic response triggered by sustained decline in system energy efficiency, a response that served specific functions in evolutionary history but is frequently misactivated in modern environments, or becomes trapped in difficult-to-exit pathological states.This paper constitutes the first part of a three-part series. Part 2 will present the energy efficiency hypothesis and its neural implementation. Part 3 will address ancient origins and modern mismatch, systematically answering this question.
关键词
抑郁症/病因异质性/症状协调性/疾病行为/能量效率
Key words
depression/ etiological heterogeneity/ symptom coordination/ sickness behavior/ energy efficiency
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