depression v. unhappiness

I found this via LES JONES (via Kevin Baker, in Theodore Dalrymple's "The Frivolity of Evil":

"There is something to be said here about the word "depression," which has almost entirely eliminated the word and even the concept of unhappiness from modern life. Of the thousands of patients I have seen, only two or three have ever claimed to be unhappy: all the rest have said that they were depressed. This semantic shift is deeply significant, for it implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means. Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed). This idea in turn implies that one's state of mind, or one's mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one's life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct."

I think this is a radically important commentary. It's true, one rarely hears anyone say they are "unhappy" any more. Instead, unhappiness has been replaced with "depression," which is a real, organic disease for some people, but isn'tthe same as unhappiness.

I was very unhappy for a period of time and was told by my family doctor that I was "suffering from depression." He was wrong, however.

I was, in fact, suffering, but the suffering was supposed to spur me to change what was making me unhappy, which it eventually did. When I made that change, I was no longer unhappy. My suffering was alleviated.

Clinical depression is unhappiness without discernible cause. Suffering and unhappiness are something entirely different from depression and are an important part of the human process of growth and change.