A Finnish study, published in the journal Psychopathology in June 2024 and summarized in Neuroscience News, indicates that health organizations contribute to the mistaken idea that depression causes symptoms rather than simply describing them. The study argues that inaccurately portraying descriptive psychiatric diagnoses as causes creates confusion and has harmful consequences.

Here in the United States, a committee of psychiatrists created the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders, or DSM. Mental health and medical professionals use the manual as the basis of diagnosing their patients and clients. Each category is a description of symptoms that the committee has reached consensus upon, and if a person meets enough criteria for a particular descriptive label, then the provider can issue a diagnosis using that category. In other words, depression is the word we use to describe a collection of symptoms such as low mood, low energy, loss of interest in daily activities, etc.

However, depression is not causative—depression does not cause depression—and the authors of this study are calling out this misleading practice.

If this confuses you, consider depression as the word we’ve all decided upon to use when we mean someone has a collection of symptoms, just as we use the word fever to describe elevated body temperature. Having a depression diagnosis does not mean that your depression caused you to feel depressed, just as having a fever isn’t the cause of the fever–something else was the cause.

It’s easy to imagine this confusion relates to most mental health criteria, but the study only explored public health organization usage of the word depression.

You may find the Neuroscience News summary here. An abstract of the study is here. A description of depression criteria is here.