A study published a few weeks ago in the Archives of General Psychiatry suggests that approximately one in four people who are diagnosed with depression are in fact reacting with normal sadness to a loss in their life.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), the mental health bible for medical professionals, provides an exclusion for bereavement-related sadness (also referred to in the study as uncomplicated depression) in its criteria for major depression, but does...