Not a lot of people know that: depression

If they called it "misery" instead of depression would people be more
sympathetic? I hope so. Sadly many people still see depression as
laziness or indifference.

The thing is that depression isn't the same as misery. It's the
medicalisation of misery, or specifically the application of science to
the problem of misery. It covers many more things
than what a lay person would consider misery. In that aspect it is
pretty darn clever.

Low mood is 1 of the 8 or 9 symptoms of depression of which 5 are needed
for a diagnosis.
What that means is that a significant percentage of people diagnosed
with depression don't experience low mood.

Low mood is what people assume is the one defining features of
depression just as they assume hearing voices is a defining feature of
schizophrenia. The false assumption that low mood is the defining
feature of depression may, perhaps, be the feminist epistomology that
pervades the modern public impression of mental health. It's noted in
research though I'm unsure how often it is recognised in clinical
practice that men, in general, can experience different depression
symptoms. Research in America studied the cluster of symptoms approach
by gender in depression. On the question of subjective unwellness the
proportion of men and women was about the same but asincreasing numbers
of concurrent symptoms (from DSM) were added from 1 to 8 or 9 the
percentage of men dropped at a faster rate. By 5 concurrent symptoms
along with a subjective assessment of unwellness the difference between
men and women was noteable. What I interpret from this is the symptoms
currently used in DSM are weighted towards the type of depression
generally seen in women.

The psychiatric understanding of depression is considerably different to
the public and perhaps the general medical understanding of depression
in general. I wonder if doctors doing the Work Capability Assessment
have an equally sophisticated understanding? I wonder if judges
understand just how complex depression is? Or other people involved in
making psychiatric assessments without full psychiatric training?

I wonder what it would be like if the public did have a deep an
understanding of the medicalisation of misery?