[tasty_freeze]

> depression seems to be something everybody has to a certain degree

One of the things that infuriates my wife, who suffers from clinical depression, is the conflation between "clinical depression" vs. the run of the mill use of "depression", eg, "I'm depressed because my team lost this weekend."

Many people think clinical depression is just like the trivial kind of depression but it the person can't shake it off. It is like telling a starving person that, hey, I was hungry a couple weeks ago but I simply got busy doing something and I forgot that I was hungry. You should try it!

My wife said this cartoon captures a lot of her own experiences.

https://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2011/10/adventures-in...

The author of that published an extended book of the same material.

[Freegile]

    "clinical depression" vs. the run of the
    mill use of "depression"

This is exactly what I am interested in. If it is a qualitative difference or a quantitative.

If qualitative, it would be like a broken leg.

If quantitative it would be like high blood pressure.

I would be very interested if there is any research out there on this topic.

[proverbialbunny]

It's unfortunately a complex issue.

There are multiple kinds of depression. Some qualitative, some quantitative, and some a mix.

We categorize diseases by their symptoms, but multiple different diseases can have identical symptoms. When this happens, we often label that group of symptoms as one disease. We start to give it multiple different names once we have multiple kinds of treatments, each treating each kind. Psychology has this problem where multiple diseases have overlapping symptoms, and because we haven't found out a single magic bullet, we often think of depression as one thing today, when really it should be thought of as a myriad of different diseases that each give a similar profile of symptoms.