Depression as a Disease

The DSM includes listings for all those elements of a disorder which qualify depression as a disease -- diagnostic features, specifiers, recording procedures and diagnostic codes, associated descriptive features, associated laboratory findings, prevalence, course, and familial pattern. Anyone who offers the view that depression is not a disease must confront the findings of the American Psychiatric Association and that organization's inclusion of various types of depression as diseases.

For example, Major Depressive Disorders include subcategories of mild, moderate, severe without psychotic features, severe with psychotic features, in partial remission, in full remission, chronic, with catatonic features, with melancholic features, with atypical features, and with postpartum onset.

The second most important point to recognize with respect to depression and its classification as a disease is that depression does not refer to simple sadness, which every human being experiences, perhaps every day, to varying degrees.

To compare clinical depression and mere sadness is to compare an ulcer with an upset stomach. An upset stomach will go away of its own accord, or

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ommit suicide. The rate of suicide among clinically depressed patients increases as the age of the patient increases. Even if such depressed patients do not directly kill themselves, they are susceptible to "more pain and physical illness and decreased physical, social, and role functioning" (DSM, 1994, 340). In other words, it is important to see depression as a disease, and a debilitating and even potentially fatal disease, because as a disease it requires effective and specific treatment which can not only help the patient emerge from the darkness and hopelessness of that depression, but also can literally save his or her life. The longer depression goes untreated, or even undiagnosed, the more likely it is that the individual will sink into a state of hopelessness which will result in suicide, death by related diseases, or simply a long and miserable and lonely existence. Classifying depression as a disease, and making that medical conclusion a well-known fact throughout society, will make it more likely that the individual will indeed seek treatment. If the individual feels ashamed about his depression, or merely feels that it is simply a long-term sadness, he will not seek treatment, which will make the disease even wors
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