A Myth in Creation

A twitter thread by Dr. Gipps prompted me to look at the use of the term "understandable" more closely in the document " Understanding Depression " by the British Psychological Society. It appears to me that the term is used in an ambiguous and polysemous manner in the document, drawing on multiple themes and analogies, that are not only different but also generate different implications and subsequent questions. In this post I identify some of the different ways in which this term is used. A recurrent theme in the document, at least implicitly, is that depression being "understandable" poses some sort of a problem for a medical approach to depression; there is a crude sense in which it can be the case, but not necessarily. I briefly discuss this aspect of the problem as well.  1) "Another idea is that, rather than being an experience thrust upon us by biology, depression, like other emotions, is often an understandable human response to the world ar