Signs Of Depression In Adults. Depression Is "over-diagnosed" ?

Q: Too many people are being diagnosed with depression when all they are is unhappy.

A:the threshold for clinical depression is too low and risks treating normal emotional states as illness. suffer depression during their lifetime. This costs the UK economy billions in lost productivity and treatment. I wish the popularisation had started then, too. I'd have loved to have known what I was suffering from, before I fell apart from it. Maybe I could have been successfully over-treated for it earlier. one day my catchphrase "we do not all share the same experience of life" will make more sense than jelly and icecream and bowls. i think what's not getting enough attention paid to it is the distinction between situational depression and the other kinds. depression that's caused by a difficult life situation shouldn't be treated with medication, imo. at least, not exclusively. it should be treated by working with the person to enable him/her to change the situation. depression that occurs in the absence of external situational factors is a whole other class of illness if you ask me. i bet if it were separated out, the rate of dianosis per population would be relatively low. There are a couple of factors that play into that, though. For instance, I'm not sure how things are in the UK, but here in the US, if a doctor (or patient) wants HMO to cover meds, a diagnosis is needed. So people who wouldn't otherwise be thought of as bona fide depressed end up with a diagnosis. Also, it has been my experience that often a proper diagnostic procedure is not used -- doctors tend to rely on their experience and intuition, so if a person "feels" depressed to a psychiatrist -- they must be depressed. While this likely results in overdiagnosis, this might also miss cases of atypical presentation of depression, which is an even bigger problem. There is also a principle of Occam's razor in medicine -- if a person has a fever, it's most likely a flu and not an exotic tropic disease. Similar with depression, since it's so prevalent, if a person has unspecified mental troubles, chances are they are depressed, which, unfortunately, reduces depression to a catch-all diagnosis, as the article states. Also, a while ago there was a flood of ads on TV, with cute little balls bouncing around, advertising Paxil, I think. I'm pretty sure that after a wave of direct-to-consumer "ask your doctor" advertising campaign, there is a corresponding wave of people showing up at their doctors, asking for a given med. Drug companies are cunning, and the symptoms that they include in their ads are general enough that far too many people find themselves having some disorder. For a GP that sees a patient for 5 minutes, it's easy to give a low dose of SSRI which s/he figures isn't' going to hurt, but might make the patient happy. This then goes to my first point, about HMOs. In other words, it's a pretty complex issue.

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