By Fran Jeffries

Critics of psychiatry claim that doctors these days are too quick to diagnose patients as being depressed. They say psychiatry has ‘medicalized’ normal sadness by failing to consider the social and emotional context in which people develop low mood — for example, after losing a job or experiencing the breakup of an important relationship.

This diagnostic failure, they say, has created a bogus epidemic of increasing depression. But psychiatrist Ronald Pies in a recent article suggests that diagnosing depression is a lot more complicated than it might seem.

What do you think? How can you tell if what you’re going through is just a case of sadness based on sad circumstances or depression?