The unexpected loss of a job, the collapse of a marriage, or the diagnosis of a life-threatening illness all sound like very good reasons to be sad. Although feeling sad is never pleasant, researchers have shown that many instances of normal sadness--the kind that descends after you lose a job or get dumped--are being misdiagnosed as depression.

"Since 1980, an enormous 'medicalization' of unhappiness has occurred. Life's ills--whether a failure to attain an expected promotion, ongoing conflict with a spouse, or overwhelming distress from coping with competing family and work demands--are too often treated as mental disorders based on the report of a few symptoms of sadness," said Allan Horwitz, PhD and Jerome Wakefield, PhD in the November 2008 issue of Psychiatric Times.

In their book, The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Misery Into Depressive Disorder, Horwitz, a professor of Sociology and Dean of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Rutgers University, and Jerome Wakefield, a professor of Social Work at New York University, make the case that psychiatry no longer clearly differentiates between normal sadness and depressive disorder. They believe that contemporary psychiatry confuses the two because it ignores the relationshipbetween the patient's symptoms and the context from which they emerge.