Depression is 'over-diagnosed'

Too many people are being diagnosed with depression when all they are is unhappy, a leading psychiatrist says. Professor Gordon Parker claims the threshold for clinical depression is too low and risks treating normal emotional states as illness. Writing in the British Medical Journal, he calls depression a "catch-all" diagnosis driven by clever marketing.

Professor Parker, from the University of New South Wales, in Australia, said the "over-diagnosis" began around 25 years ago. The professor carried out a 15-year study of 242 teachers found that more than three-quarters of them met the current criteria for depression. He writes in the BMJ that almost everyone had symptoms such as "feeling sad, blue or down in the dumps" at some point in their lives - but this was not the same as clinical depression which required treatment.

He said prescribing medication may raise false hopes and might not be effective as there was nothing biologically wrong with the patient. He said: "Over the last 30 years the formal definitions for defining clinical depression have expanded into the territory of normal depression, and the real risk is that the milder, more common experiences risk being pathologized."

Bonnie - whoah...Professor Parker is going way out on a limb here as far as psychiatrists go. However, I do agree with him wholeheartedly.