Wakefield and Keedwell are apparently (I only have this report's word for it) both making a mistake I thought we got past decades ago: that every person suffering from clinical depression is either under long term stress or going through a grieving process because of sad events or in some similar way miserable because of their situation or circumstances.

I suffer from mild but chronic clinical depression and have been on a prescribed medication for 10 years now. It was probably originally triggered, some 20 years ago in my late 30s, by a period of stress caused by high pressure in my work at that time, followed by a sharp reduction in that pressure which was when I first experienced a depressive period of a few weeks (after which I recovered so depression was not diagnosed until 10 years later. However for much of the last 6 years at least I have had no significant stress, and yet now, though mostly retired, I still cannot function by day or sleep soundly at night without the quite small nightly antidepressant I take. The condition is shared in varying degrees by several of my 4 siblings and was present in my father and his 3 siblings for much of their lives, and I have been told it is hereditary.

Not using my medication would do nothing for me; it has nothing to do with sadness, being miserable because of events of bereavement, missed opportunities to improve my life, failure to appreciate what I want from life or to learn from mistakes. The only time that misery comes in is if for any reason I do not take the medication for some days. Then, I can lose the ability to sleep soundly so that I feel permanently tired as though I have only had 2 to 3 hours of sleep every night for weks on end; I thus lose the impetus to get up in the morning. When I do get up, I have little motivation to do anything. This happened when I was working (at a career I enjoyed) and happens now, when on most days I can look forward to spending all day doing whatever I feel like doing (and I have many interests and activities).

That is to say that I have a life low-key in financial terms but free from stress and with almost all my time free for me to enjoy life to the full, for I do not need much money to do the things I enjoy and have what I need so as not to have any worries. And yet without the medication I would be unable to enjoy that freedom smply because without that help my brain chemistry makes me miserable. About what? Nothing! That's the point: I have absolutely nothing to be sad or miserable about but I would go about my home (or when out) just permanently fretful, evidently in distress but over nothing at all. Every sad story, even those just moderately so, on the radio or TV news would have me bursting into inconsolable tears, and so would happy endings; TV dramas and movies with high points whether sad or happy would have the same effect. These happen anyway all the time --- have done for several years even though I am on themedication continually. Without the prescription I would simply be so permanently distressed that I would be unable to function or do just about anything (like going shopping for food, or preparing and eating it).

I am a mathematician, logician and information systems engineer, not a biochemist, and I do not really know how the brain chemistry works despite having read a number of books on the subject to try to improve my understanding of my conditions, and I am pretty satisfied as (in philosophical terms) a scientist, that my own experience is at least one example of a person who has no outside reasons for being "depressed" (in the non-clinical sense) --- no stress, no bad living conditions, no strained relationships, no boring job, no nagging boss or partner, no money worries.

I conclude that these scientists are only actually talking about people who have circumstantial reasons to be sad or miserable, not about people with actual clinical depression which (by definition) is not actually about emotional states caused by events and circumstances at all; yet this story, or the quotations from the scientists in it, does not say that.

This article lacks a very important fact:
You can't learn from a 'full blown' depression without adequate psychotherapeutical help. And you cannot learn from your mistakes while you believe you yourself are a mistake.
In these severe cases, antidepressants don't make it all 'go away', they just ease the pain to a level where you are able to see the possibility for change an a future again. No good ever came from being left alone with suicidal thoughts.
I'd have been dead for roughly three years now, had I not gotten the right medication.

Society as a whole seems to be very intolerant of depression. The standard 'answer' seems to be to (rather quickly) attach a descriptive (and sometimes prejudicial) label to it so that it can fall within the medically defined categories of a disorder and then send the person into auto-pilot mode with the aid of prescription medications. Perhaps if we worked on redefining perceptions of 'normal' and 'natural', we would embrace a far wider spectrum of emotions and personality types without the 'quick fix' mentality that pervades the times in which we live.