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chaosmage comments on Depression's evolutionary roots - Less Wrong Discussion
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If that were true, psychotherapy (especially psychotherapy focused on the patient's relationships) would always work. (Incidentally, at least on the authors is a psychiatrist in private practice, who would want to believe that.) That isn't the case.
I think the rank theory of depression, while similarly characterized by evolutionary/speculative reasoning, makes a lot more sense.
Something having evolved because it's adaptive in the cases when it's temporary doesn't mean that trying to treat its non-temporary manifestations would always work. The mechanism that was normally supposed to bring us out of depression could be broken.
The mechanism that prevents other people from denegrating someone who already looks downcast could break too.
Psychotherapy wouldn't work if working with the psychotherapist didn't elicit a workable solution. I've intermittently found psychotherapy to be very helpful, but it doesn't always solve the problem for which I went to psychotherapy for.
Could it somehow be both? Maybe if you have lower status, solving complex problems becomes relatively more important, because you have less alternative opportunities. For higher-status people, even when they are capable of solving problems, letting other people solve problems and just taking their stuff is probably more profitable. Losing status could imply that you should switch to problem-solving mode, because that's the way to be useful to your new masters (and your quality of life now depends on their opinions).