From Jonathan Sadowski's The Empire of Depression on how to solve the problem of diagnosing depression:

> One possible solution is to use local categories, or "idioms of distress," that are used by particular cultures, instead of supposedly universal diagnoses (Chapter 1, page 17).

I don't think this will work.

If diagnoses are not rooted in descriptions of biological events, we are just playing with words. We are just relying on the language of the time to describe how people feel.

That is the root of the problem: depression is still not understood well enough, and because we don't understand it well we don't know what to look for in a patient's brain/body to identify it's presence.

I'd argue that we don't need to understand WHY depression happens. The first step is making educated guesses about what biological state maps to what we label as "depression".

From there, we can iterate on that definition. Refine our mapping algorithms. And slowly mold a definition of depression and not-depression.

But we need biology as an anchor.

I had a question while running:

> At what point do babies develop a sense of self? And what about their brains changed? What regions of the brain changed that allowed for the sense of self to emerge / be possible? Why doesn't a sense of self develop for other organisms? Do other organisms have a sense of self? If no, do these organisms have different brain systems than us?