ABSTRACT
When is guilt pathological? Should full health be a goal of treatment for depression? How should a clinician approach a patient who feels his life is pointless?
Answering such questions requires a frame of reference for understanding health which is larger than the checklist of symptoms that have often come to define depression. Many if not most clinicians choose a framework based on adaptive functioning in the world. But as Vaillant* points out, assessing functional adaptation depends on understanding the tasks of living.
