I skipped through this thread and I just want to air a bit of laundry, I hope returning to an earlier point doesn't derail anything.
I want to talk about the pharmaceutical companies. Back in the 70's the American Psychiatric Association decided to share their bed with the drug companies. At first, it was to sponsor conferences and the like but it was only a short period of time before they were influencing what was taught and thought in the industry.
The DSM doubled in size and then doubled again as attempts were made to pathologize more and more human behaviour. And thereby legitimize treatment.
When the labs were unable to create more patent-able analogs of earlier meds, the pharmaceutical companies got new patents by showing that the old meds were useful for other ailments. At the same time they extended markets and now our kids are targeted.
Know what? I am just going to stop now. This is one topic capable of changing my mood for the day. I get pretty worked up. People get cancer but societies can get it too.
Change topic:
I met the criteria for Bipolar Disorder for much of my life. I could not get my Dr to see anything but psych-symptoms in my presentation. Our disagreements around this have soured our relationship. Especially when I informed him that I was moving against mercury and adopting Freddd's Protocol and had the audacity to improve.
Try not to let words like Bipolar, depression, Generalized Anxiety Disorder and the like, get under your skin. Still. fight to have PEM, brain-fog and OI etc recognized as having the greatest impact on your day-to-day functioning if that is where you are with your illness.
Like every other symptom spoken of here, there will be a continuum. If we polled how depression manifests itself in this population it would extend from a bad case of the blues all the way to a vegetative state. But no matter how severe, "depression" is still just a word. A communication device to help people categorize clusters of symptoms. It is not a "thing". Depression is just one of the ways that the brain uses to say, "ouch".
I have had this as part of Bipolar cycling and as a stand alone symptom. Some of us would be dead at our own hands if we did not "own" this, put a name to it, and treat it. There have been times in our lives when depression has been our worst symptom.
PEM is not stigmatizing; OI is not stigmatizing (at least not in this community) and there are no impassioned entries or arguments about them on this site - only the symptom cluster called "depression" seems capable of bringing this out.
I feel that there are people who, if they were honest about it, find this idea or diagnosis to be objectionable at some level. For some funny reason this makes me feel as if I am being somehow judged and I'll bet that I am not the only one.