Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. being treated for "mood disorder"

[HereSince1628]

57. It's my belief we are basically on the same side in this.

I didn't mean to call you a stigmatizer, I don't think I actually did. I recognized your motivation in response to the previous post.

My point about stigmatizing culture in American and DU was a two part observation first to remind everyone of the patently obvious...Many Americans and a not small count of DUers use stigmatizing language that promotes a stigmatizing culture...a culture that fosters the belief that mental illness is typically fake or volitional. The second part acknowledges your observation about lack of compassion--my point is that there is no compassion largely because we have our general American cultural views of mental illness and a DU culture that frequently promotes quick quips based on limited understanding.

My other statements are simply my opinion, not a judgement of your post...which as I said could be correct.

I just don't think long distance diagnosis with limited information is dependably reliable. Psychological diagnoses already have a bad reputation for being 'unstable' (which is shorthand for often requiring re-designation/change in diagnosis).

If "Mood Disorder" actually means the classification group called mood disorders as used in DSM then, depression, bipolar and a number of substance induced mood disorders and mood disorder NOS, are possibilities.

If mood disorder simply means low affect it could be a number of other things. I can think of a number of Axis I possibilities as well as some Axis II possibilities that produce painful negative affect of long duration and that interfere with life enough to result in inpatient treatment: Adjustment disorders, Anxiety disorders, several variants within Bipolar Spectrum, unreconciled grief (which isn't just bereavement after a death), various types of clinical depression including Major Depressive Disorder, and the relatively newly proposed post-traumatic embitterment ... that's already a handful of possibilities.

Negative affective reactivity to shifts in relation to meaningful 'environmental' objects, and self-belief, also show up in several personality disorders, including for example borderline and 'closet' narcissism (as opposed to grandiose narcissim).

It's true that depression is very very common and if this was about placing bets rather than diagnosis, then going for the high probabilities is the way to play.