Feeling down: when does a mood become a disorder?
By Gordon Parker and Amelia Paterson We’ve all felt sad, anxious or down at one time or another, but where does the normal experience of emotion end and the clinical picture of a mood or anxiety disorder begin? Psychiatry has two widely used classificatory systems that provide definitions of “clinical” states of such emotions as differentiated from “normal” states – the World Health Organisation’s International Classification of Diseases and the …