But accomplishing nothing and taking pleasure in nothing for months or years is clearly destructive. I don't think the piece meant to suggest otherwise, but it came off seeming as if it did.
That's because years of raising public awareness of depression as a serious problem has led to people no longer labeling minor episodes "depression." It used to be common for someone to say, "I'm depressed," or "I'm feeling depressed," when they were, umm, down in the dumps. People have stopped saying that now that clinical depression has become the primary meaning of the word. A lot of public awareness work went into making people realize that major clinical depression is very, very different from just feeling sad. It was important for people to realize that. However, it doesn't mean there aren't illuminating connections between major clinical depression and just feeling down in the dumps for a while. Consider the difference between a burning house and a burning candle -- it's important for people to understand the difference, but they're both "fire." If we redefined the word "fire" to only mean life-threatening, out-of-control forms of fire, wouldn't that actually weaken our understanding of fire?
There are a whole bunch of people jumping into this thread to make the point that using "depression" to refer to anything other than a mental illness is wrong. But that is a recent redefinition of the word justified by the laudable goal of helping people realize how serious depression can be. (Basically, it's PR elevated to PC by its good intentions.) That meaning has obviously served a valuable purpose. The question is, does the traditional definition of depression actually encode a better understanding than this new PR/PC definition? Maybe, as with "fire," it's best to distinguish different forms of depression by qualifiers and special terms rather than pretend they're entirely different and unrelated things.
That's because years of raising public awareness of depression as a serious problem has led to people no longer labeling minor episodes "depression." It used to be common for someone to say, "I'm depressed," or "I'm feeling depressed," when they were, umm, down in the dumps. People have stopped saying that now that clinical depression has become the primary meaning of the word. A lot of public awareness work went into making people realize that major clinical depression is very, very different from just feeling sad. It was important for people to realize that. However, it doesn't mean there aren't illuminating connections between major clinical depression and just feeling down in the dumps for a while. Consider the difference between a burning house and a burning candle -- it's important for people to understand the difference, but they're both "fire." If we redefined the word "fire" to only mean life-threatening, out-of-control forms of fire, wouldn't that actually weaken our understanding of fire?
To support my point that the meaning of the word is changing, consider the difference between the dictionary definition: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/depression
and the way the word is defined at NIMH: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/depression/compl...
There are a whole bunch of people jumping into this thread to make the point that using "depression" to refer to anything other than a mental illness is wrong. But that is a recent redefinition of the word justified by the laudable goal of helping people realize how serious depression can be. (Basically, it's PR elevated to PC by its good intentions.) That meaning has obviously served a valuable purpose. The question is, does the traditional definition of depression actually encode a better understanding than this new PR/PC definition? Maybe, as with "fire," it's best to distinguish different forms of depression by qualifiers and special terms rather than pretend they're entirely different and unrelated things.