The circadian–mood seam — supplying the contributor mind locked

Mind's depression chapter named a circadian contributor and locked it. This chapter supplies it: misalignment flattens the gated HPA cortisol rhythm (flattening index 0 → 2.11085, aligned→antiphase), and that sustained, demand-misaligned signal is mind's withdrawal-bias handle (b < 0). Sign only; the felt quality of low mood stays in mind (consciousness_claim = 0).

This is the sharpest seam in the volume. The mind paper modelled depression on an HPA withdrawal handle and explicitly locked the circadian contributor; the circadian clock supplies it by flattening the gated cortisol rhythm under misalignment, which maps to mind's withdrawal bias through the shared coupling map and chronifies under mind's plasticity layer. The same timing seam aggravates mind's coupling reading of autism. Only the sign crosses; the magnitude is owned by mind, the felt quality stays behind mind's Axis-A firewall, and efficacy is zero.

Mind left a door open, by name

The mind volume's depression chapter modelled major depression as the chronification of a low-coordination operating point, driven by an HPA-stress withdrawal bias, and it explicitly locked the heterogeneity of real depression — melancholic, atypical, psychotic, peripartum, seasonal, bipolar, with monoaminergic, HPA, inflammatory, circadian and psychosocial contributors. The circadian contributor was named and left unmodelled. This chapter supplies exactly that one contributor, and nothing more.

Misalignment flattens the gated HPA rhythm, monotonically

Take the gated cortisol rhythm of §5 and misalign the clock by a growing phase shift. The HPA flattening index — the loss of demand-aligned cortisol relative to the healthy clock — grows monotonically with misalignment: 0 (aligned) → 0.830719 → 2.11085 (antiphase), running from a healthy rhythm to a fully demand-misaligned one. A flattened, demand-misaligned cortisol signal is a sustained, dysregulated HPA signal.

That sustained signal is mind's withdrawal handle — sign only

Here the seam closes. In mind, a sustained dysregulated cortisol signal sits on the withdrawal pole of the valence geometry and acts as a withdrawal bias b < 0, which lowers effective coupling through the same map the schizophrenia and epilepsy modules use (k = κ/(1+|b|)) → hypo-coordination, and under mind's E0 plasticity layer the excursion chronifies. So circadian misalignment → HPA flattening → (mind: sustained withdrawal bias → hypo-coordination → chronification). This is the circadian depression contributor, now supplied.

The firewall: timing in, felt quality stays out

What crosses this seam is a sign, not a feeling. The package asserts the direction — misalignment moves the HPA signal in the withdrawal direction — and the magnitude is [O], owned by mind. The felt quality of low mood does not cross: it stays in mind behind the Axis-A firewall (consciousness_claim = 0, the hard problem open). This package models the timing perturbation of the HPA setpoint, not depression itself; efficacy = 0; not medical advice. The same timing seam also aggravates mind's coupling-organisation reading of autism, where circadian and sleep disruption is common — again sign only, with the coupling pathology owned by mind (concept DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20694404). The mind anchor R = 0.38961455156044245 (engine tree 0fbf4988…) is cited, not recomputed.