Clinical Depression Test. Test - was: THE SUNDAY MORNING CHECK IN ?

Q.Depression is a psychiatric term and condition, while clinical depression is neither. In other words, the term depression is used by psychiatrists to describe a set of signs and symptoms that constitute a defined psychiatric condition, while the term clinical depression is not used by psychiatrists to describe a set of signs and symptoms that constitute a defined psychiatric condition.

A.we're back to being able to say that depression (both the term and the condition) has existed for a long long time, while clinical depression (both the term and the condition) is a relatively recent invention. That's the last thing I would do. My specialty as an undergraduate was keeping clear on the distinction between words and objects. Yes, water (the substance) existed long before water (the word) was invented to describe it. But clinical water (the substance) didn't exist until I invented clinical water (the word). In case you are wondering, clinical water is defined as water that doesn't taste good until a psychiatrist says it does. And since psychiatrists didn't exist until relatively recently, you can see that clinical water didn't exist until relatively recently either. By definition, the existance of clinical water cannot predate the existance of psychiatrists. Of course, one can always just cobble together new, arbitrary diagnostics definitions at will, but if you DO in any sense "create" a disorder by just defining it into existence using a set of criteria not corresponding to any real natural condition, you're doing bad science. You may be telling an interesting story, but you're not describing a natural phenomenon. This, in fact, is an objection to some of the crap in DSM -- that some of the conditions, while they may have neatly spelled-out criteria, are not, in any medically important sense, real. The term clinical depression *is* a term that does indeed refer to arbitrary diagnostic definitions that are made up at will by whomever choses to make them up. You won't find the term clinical depression in the DSM. Thus the term, and the condition, are relatively new. Unless of course you want to make up a definition for the term that refers to something old. In that case you would indeed be simply renaming an old condition with a new name.

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