ABSTRACT
The psychiatric disorder of ‘major depression’ is selected to argue the case that depressed mood is best described as a family of human woes with contextual causes, rather than an illness caused by somatic dysfunction. Various ways of representing depressed mood (e.g. along a continuum of hedonic states, as a complex set of behaviours, and as a psychiatric syndrome) are reviewed. Assessment of depressed mood by self-report scales is critiqued, especially when the latter are taken as evidence for pathology. A review of research that relates ‘major depression’ to bodily processes, genes, gender, and social variables, provides little evidence that ‘depression’ is either a unitary condition or a somatic disease.
