July 30, 2024Information about depression found online is commonly misleading. Many popular health websites mislabel depression as a cause of symptoms rather than a description of those symptoms, according to a study published in Psychopathology.1Thirty organizations, including top institutions such as the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and the World Health Organization (WHO), were included in the study.
Descriptions of depression from each website were classified into one of three groups: causally explanatory, descriptive, or unspecified.More than half (53%) of websites presented depression as explicitly causing symptoms or used language that was both descriptive and causal.
The remainder (46%) used language that was not clearly defined. Examples of each category include:Psychiatric diagnoses are purely descriptive; yet, none of the organizations directly referred to depression in this way. “The American Psychiatric Association, in the DSM-5, makes explicitly clear that the diagnostic criteria of mental disorders are descriptive in nature because the underlying pathologies are not known,” wrote authors Jani Kajanojaa and Jussi Valtonenb.Rather, the authors noted that many leading health authorities used circular reasoning — a logical fallacy — when referencing depression.
Circular reasoning occurs when a condition (or claim) and its cause (or evidence) are made synonymous. Circular reasoning is also commonly associated with ADHD 2 — a disorder that is highly comorbid with depression.