Clinical Depression exists. I have it and I suffer major depression pretty much all the time. It is caused mostly by a lack of one or more neurotransmitters in the brain. They have not developed a way to test medically for it.
If there's no way to test for it, then the doctors are just guessing...This is why depression is not a disease in the strictly defined sense...The diagnosis is made on purely anecdotal evidence.
Believe me, I'm not minimizing your particular experience...I'm just saying that the doctors are guessing and people are getting needlessly hooked on antidepressants.
Are Antidepressants Addictive?
Discontinuing use of some popular medications may cause side effects that mimic a relapse in depression.
By Tiffany Kary, published on July 01, 2003 - last reviewed on January 25, 2007
The pain and nausea some people feel when they stop taking certain antidepressants is spurring controversy over whether these drugs should carry explicit warning labels about withdrawal.
Jame Tierney was 14 years old when she started taking Effexor, a serotonin norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor (SNRI), for her migraines. When she slowly tapered off the drug, Jame experienced vomiting, suicidal impulses, electric shock-like sensations and fatigue. She likened her confusion of time and space to special effects in the movie The Matrix.
Such withdrawal has often been mistaken for depression relapse. However, mounting testimony from people like Jame, who were prescribed SNRIs or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), such as Prozac or Zoloft, for nonpsychiatric conditions could publicize what doctors say is a phenomenon recognized since the late 1990s. Patients using Paxil and Effexor report the most severe problems because those drugs have the shortest half-lives, which make them the quickest to exit the system
No, the problem is that there is no way to actually see and physically measure a neurotransmitter, to test if the hypothesis is correct or not.
Kids are the most over diagnosed of the lot. Act up as a teenager naturally does and an over concerned parent or Teacher will get you seen by a therapist or Doctor that has a vested interest in you being depressed.
The local mental health facility went from treating adults and senile old to no old people only about 10 beds for adults and almost exclusively treating teenagers and small children.
Further in children and teenagers the drugs that are common to the current era do not work on them. They actually induce the very effects they are supposed to treat.
Kids are overdiagnosed for just about all unquantifiable and unverifiable "disorders"...It's good to catch the kids while they're young, so they can be programmed to think that they are on the effect end of the world and their bodies....Makes for much more compliant little proles.