Even today, a lot of what we know in medicine, psychology, philosophy and literature is influenced by the Ancient Greeks. Some ideas however, have fallen by the wayside. The Ancient Greek understanding of depression is one such idea. This held that depression was an imbalance in humors, bodily fluids which dictate an individual's personality and health. An imbalance signified some sort of illness or ailment. While discredited, it gives the first scientific attempt at understanding depression. This was classed as melancholia, after the Greek word for black bile which was thought to be the cause of depression. Melancholia was later used as a catch all term for any depressive thoughts of behaviours.
Nowadays, melancholy has fallen by the wayside in favour of the catch-all term of depression. It's a good bet that most people have complained of feeling depressed at some point in their lives. The difference here is that while melancholy was used as a term for all low mood, depression is a clinical term for a serious mental illness which can ruin the life of an individual. Not ruin as in "having a bad day", ruin as in "suicide". However, just as people use lurgy as a catch-all term for any combination of symptoms from influenza or a cold, people use depression as a way to express their mood. And if you want to talk etymology, that may just well be valid.
It isn't just depression however, a large number of mental illnesses are used in such a liquid fashion.When things get busy and Jones is rushing around like a lunatic, you may say he is manic. Debbie likes to keep her desk clean because she's a bit OCD. You can never tell which face the boss will show today, he's such a schizo. That boy that got a bit lairy in the pub at the weekend? Turns out he stabbed a boy and got put in the cells, he's a psycho!
On one hand, this can be understood in post modern terms. Language is liquid, and to ignore that is to be branded a Luddite (although I've always had sympathy with the machine breakers). Words are appropriated to suit new meanings as and when people want. That's the beauty of language and always has been, see Shakespeare for example. On the other hand, these words are medical definitions of, in many cases serious mental illnesses. There are three problems with this. Firstly, to call your friend a schizo is to use the word in the most crass and tabloid way you can. Secondly, to use it as an insult is to create a negative connotation of a mental illness. While this has been covered previously with swearing and with homosexual slang, the third point is that in doing this, you are trivialising schizophrenia. It fails to become a significant problem because of the alternative definition. It makes schizophrenia harder to understand, and it isn't the easiest of mental illnesses to categorise or define in the first place.
This trend has caused psychologists, psychiatrists and all medical research to potentially over-classify mental illness. The DSM is a tome of a publication used by clinicians to diagnose mental illnesses. The most recent update is due in 2013 but there is already growing debate as to whether all minor mood shifts and behavioural abnormalities are being classified as mental illness. Some have even called it a "medicalisation of normality". A section called "Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders" is also creating a large rift. The biggest issue is whether the whole system needs to be scrapped and the idea of mental disorder be revised completely.
There's no witty buzz line here, no catchphrase. This is a serious issue that can be understood through the theory of liquid modernity. The medicalisation of normality can be seen as linked through the casual use of medical terms in everyday parlance. In an effort to escape from this, more and more conditions have been created until almost everyone fits under one umbrella and can be classified as mentally ill in one way or another. This detracts from the seriousness of a condition which, as Rollo May puts it, leaves the individual with “...the inability to construct a future”, as in the case of depression.
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