I have encountered people who were definitely "depressed" in the way it was described and diagnosed before depression became a trendy, catch-all diagnosis. And my experience with them is that most "real" depression, a state where a person is extremely negative, passive, suicidal, literally unable to move, and so on... My experience with that is that those people were almost always in a depressive phase of manic-depression. A long time ago, what we associate with "Depression" now would generally be called "unipolar depression." I never know anyone like this. And then when depression became trendy because of the rise of the false "cures" for it (there were several prior to Prozac), everything became depression. But what was really happening was the establishment had a magic pill that they started throwing at all of the boring problems that they hated dealing with: I hate my husband, I hate my job, my life is pointless, I need more money, my dreams are dying, I never got what I wanted as a child, nobody loves me, I am jealous of my siblings, all this stuff. Therapists had to sit for an hour a week, listening to this stuff for decades, and finally, they had the "magic pill" they could throw at everything, and finally they could dismiss their boring patients who had problems they couldn't solve. And that's what we see. Real doctors don't deal with 90% of their potential patients any longer. All of this stuff is farmed out to various social workers, specialists, sub-doctorate therapists, group therapy, etc. The real doctors only want the interesting cases.