I've always thought that there is a real, qualitative difference between clinical depression and feeling bad for a good reason.

My sister has dealt with bipolar disorder for her whole life; for years, she was diagnosed with "depression" and never had successful results from treatment until the diagnosis was modified to "bipolar," since which time she has been doing better thanks to more appropriate meds, etc. One of our aunts, long dead, suffered from mental illness, likely the same or a similar condition although not diagnosed as such back in the 1940s and 50s. She died of pneumonia in a state mental hospital shortly after undergoing electroshock therapy..

I'm providing this background to indicate that I have plenty of sympathy for unexplained bouts of depression, even though I can state with some confidence that I am not subject to that kind of trouble myself.

My daughter has been epileptic since childhood and now, at age thirty, has been an out-of-control opiate addict for more than ten years. (Pills, not needles ~ which has made the problem much less evident for quite a while.) She is also very likely to have inherited the family propensity for bipolar disorder and/or clinical depression, although by this time, it may be hard to separate her drug-induced problems from other aspects of her sorry condition.

Her life has become especially miserable over the past year; her no-good boyfriend and partner in addiction is in jail, and their two daughters, our only grandchildren, have been taken away by the state and placed with a foster family for permanent adoption.

On top of everything else, my dear wife is falling into a state of dementia at the relatively early age of 54. While her condition is organic and physical, not strictly psychological, and is probably inherited as well, it is hard to believe that the emotional trauma of losing our grandbabies did not contribute to her misery and hasten the onset of the terminal neurological condition that has gripped her.

She began seeing a therapist several years ago, mainly due to the problems and heartache involved in her relationship with our wayward daughter. Now that she can no longer drive, and also is losing her ability to speak clearly, I've been attending the therapy sessions with her and "her" therapist has become "our" therapist.

As you might imagine, I'm not feeling too good myself, either, these days. I have an appointment with a full-fledged psycholanalyst fairly soon, scheduled mainly as a way to have some kind of anti-depressant medication prescribed. (Our regular therapist is not qualifed to write scrips, she's just a BCSW.)

I don't deny that I'm miserable, and I certainly hope that medication will make it easier for me to get up in the morning, get to work, and to concentrate on work instead of frittering away my time websurfing (and, specifically, Mudcatting).

But I truly believe that my problem is NOT the same as the kind of irrational depression that I've seen others suffer; I'm miserable for a reason ~ several reasons in fact ~ that will not be going away anytime soon. Is there really any point, any constructive prospect, to achieving a "happier" state through medication when the underlying causes of my unhappiness continue to exist?