Major depressive disorder is a former featured article candidate. Please view the links under Article milestones below to see why the nomination was archived. For older candidates, please check the archive.
Article milestones Date Process Result July 9, 2006 Good article nominee Listed December 31, 2006 Good article reassessment Delisted April 3, 2007 Featured article candidate Not promoted
Current status: Former featured article candidate

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Clinical depression is a severe illness that won't necessarily go away if you remove the original cause. It can take antidepressants to get rid of the illness even if the cause has been removed. There are also depressions that aren't caused by circumstances, but come from within.

Sardaka 10:13, 12 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The idea that depression is always caused by external forces and that medication allows people to "quit feeling sorry for themselves" is absurd. If this were so, antidepressant medications would not work. SSRIs are a common effective treatment medication. SSRI stands for Selective Seretonin Reuptake Inhibitor. By nature, it does not introduce new chemicals into the body, it prevents the seretonin that is naturally produced by the body from being re-absorbed by the parent neuron - a process that can be thought of as a "glitch" in the body -- the seretonin should not be subject to re-uptake, and the medications allow the body to make use of the neurotransmitters already in the body. Assuming a subject with clinical depression is taking SSRIs, once they "feel better" (i.e. overcome the depression) complete cessation of the medication may result in a relapse into depression -- because the body is still malfunctioning.

On a side note -- it is attitudes like the one mentioned above that cause the negative stigma that is attached to mental healthcare and lead to so many undiagnosed and untreated mental disorders. Riley812 00:07, 13 October 2007 (UTC)Riley812[reply]

Given the current size of the article (61k), perhaps it some of it should be split away into a sub-article? Maybe the treatment section? --Ronz 16:09, 3 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Depression and natural therapies is a povfork, and contains little if anything not already in this article (other than unsourced and poorly sourced information with NPOV problems). It should be merged into this article. --Ronz 16:12, 3 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. No reason to have that seperate at all. Collectonian 17:38, 4 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Keep these articles separate but have them interlink better. Currently, Clinical depression doesn't link to this article, for instance. There seems to be enough info here to justify having a separate article. That being said, Depression and natural therapies should be expanded perhaps to discuss in greater detail the history behind using natural therapies to treat depression. I think that would certainly make the article even more encyclopedic. (Based on the thread just above, this article already seems to be pushing the file size threshhold. Merging would certainly cause a size issue.) -- Levine2112 ^discuss 17:31, 10 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

If going with separate articles, then wouldn't it better to have the entire treatment section as a separate interlined article rather than just the natural therapies aspect? Collectonian 21:12, 11 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Exactly. Then we don't have the povfork issues. --Ronz 21:15, 11 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

We don't have a povfork issue in the first place. The article wasn't created as a fork for pushing a point of view, at the risk of repeating myself. It was created to cover ground that wasn't covered in the first article.

Sardaka 10:09, 12 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It appears to be a POV fork, whether that was the actual intention or not. For whatever reason, you did not add it to the main article, but instead created a new article that that only discusses "natural" therapies with no clear definition of what "natural" is except that it isn't anti-depressants. The list could quite easily and snuggly fit into the main from the get go, which would have served to improve the original. If you felt the article was already too large (though other articles about medical issues are just as long if not longer), then the better option would be a separate treatment page all together. Instead, you made no attempt to contribute to this article, but created a page that focuses only on the treatments of interest to you. To me, that is very much a POV fork. Collectonian 14:12, 12 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The existence of an article on depression doesn't mean that there couldn't be other articles about depression. For example, if you look up Sydney, you will find many articles about it, on different aspects: general, history, architecture etc. This is a legit way of covering the subject. With depression, there can be more than one article to cover different aspects of the issue. the existence of the first article doesn't preclude others.

Sardaka 09:52, 17 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Sydney is a country, not a medical condition and those are not POV forks. The natural therapies article is not a seperate aspect moved, it is a POV fork and will be merged. After the merge, and the during the clean up discussed below, if appropriate, neutral sections will be broken out covering ALL treatment options, not just your fork. Collectonian 13:38, 17 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

No offense, but someone "liking" the image is not a reason to keep it. What does it contribute to the article? Does it "illustrate" depression, no. Does it add anything to the article at all? No. It should be removed. See Wikipedia:Images#Image_choice_and_placement. Collectonian 03:50, 15 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The portrayal of depression in art is quite relevant and beneficial to the article in my view. 58.151.182.166 11:29, 15 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

How does this particular image provide any benefits to the article, or add relevance? Do any other medical articles include paintings depicting someone suffering from mental illnesses (or any other disease)? I didn't find any. An image is good, but certainly there can be a more academic image used rather than a painting. Collectonian 18:53, 15 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The use of the image here does conform with Wikipedia:Images#Image_choice_and_placement in my view. The painting does illustrate depression. Its being a painting should not constitute a reason for its removal. Even serious magazines like New Scientist often use quite arty images to illustrate their articles. I am in favour of keeping it. --John 19:25, 15 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I guess I'm curious as to how it illustrates depression. There are different kinds of depression and it certainly doesn't illustrate them all. It doesn't really illustrate any, IMHO, except perhaps the artist's own instance as depression manifests itself differently in different people depending on a variety of circumstances. However, if others feel this actually somehow illustrates a mental illness, cool, let it stay. The article has much bigger issues to worry about and much more major work needed than to worry too much about the image ;-) I did, however, move it down a little because it was covering some text in the intro in IE 6. Collectonian 19:58, 15 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with everything you say. I don't feel that strongly about the image either. Let's make the article better. What would you say are its main failings? --John 20:00, 15 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Probably the top three right now are the need to merge in that natural remedies article, lack of sufficient sources, and the strong need to redo the article to be more inline with the med article style guides. The latter two seem to be primary reasons it got its rating dropped and it was not considered for featured article status. A major undertaking, to be sure. I keep trying to think of smaller pieces to break it into so it doesn't seem to overwhelming, because it is such a huge topic. Any ideas? Collectonian 20:40, 15 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I am removing PMDD from the list of other depressive disorders. It does not belong there, for example, see http://pmdd.factsforhealth.org/what/faq.asp: "

How does depression relate to PMDD?

Depression is one of the more common symptoms of PMDD. Women often feel sad, blue, unhappy, down in the dumps, and/or hopeless as part of the PMDD symptom complex. But remember, the depressive symptoms of PMDD are linked to the menstrual cycle and must be absent at least during the week following menses. Also, depression is not necessary for the diagnosis of PMDD. Some women find anxiety and tension or anger and irritability to be the most disturbing symptoms and do not consider themselves depressed.

Women with PMDD also may have a coexisting depressive illness such as Major Depressive Disorder or Bipolar (manic depressive) Disorder. These conditions sometimes begin before the onset of PMDD and sometimes follow it. They differ from PMDD in not being linked to the menstrual cycle. While symptoms of these illnesses may worsen premenstrually, they persist throughout the entire cycle." Paul gene 02:48, 21 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]