[wdewind]

It's complicated. You could argue stress is always the root cause and what varies is simply one's reaction to the stress. I feel deeply uncomfortable drawing a line between people who have "real depression" and "stress caused" depression. You wouldn't make the same comparison with people who have less advanced degrees of cancer, and yet those too can be stress induced, and thus viewed as "self inflicted."

[jmathai]

Isn't cancer much easier to diagnose than mental illness? I think the complexity of mental illness is why we struggle, as a society, to properly understand and deal with it.

That being said I agree that drawing a line is difficult and possibly counter productive. When dealing with people's lives it can lead to more confusion than it helps explain.