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Patients, clinicians, researchers, and the general public commonly assume that depression is inexorably intertwined with the material and social worlds of the person with depression. There can be little doubt that when bad things happen, people become distressed and unhappy. When very bad things happen, some people become clinically depressed. Once a person has developed depression, his or her social and material worlds are altered, often in adverse ways that compound and perpetuate the original problem, outlast the depressive episode, and perhaps contribute to future recurrences of the disorder. A better understanding of depression, its origins and long-term course, requires enlarging the scope of inquiry to take into account the interplay of social-environmental factors and life stress with depression over the course of an episode, as well as over the lifetime of the individual. We begin this chapter with …