"Don't Confuse Depression and Grief, Author Advises" from Psychiatric News by Aaron Levin

Kay Redfield Jamison, Ph.D., who has endured mental illness and her husband's death, realizes that depression is destructive and alienating, but that grief acts to preserve the self and draw people together. “It has been said that grief is a kind of madness,” Kay Redfield Jamison, Ph.D., told listeners at APA's Institute on Psychiatric Services in Boston in October. “I disagree.” Kay Redfield Jamison, Ph.D.: “Madness prepared me for grief. It gave me an unsentimental gauge by which to test my sanity within my grief and a respect for the true terror that is at the core of madness.” She spoke in hope of adding to the discussion over proposed elimination of the grief exclusion from the DSM-5's criteria for major depressive disorder. That possible change has been characterized by some as medicalizing normal human experience. “There is a kind of sanity to grief,” continued Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and honorary professor of English at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. “It provides a path—albeit a broken one—by which those who grieve can find their way. Grief is not a disease; it is a necessity.”

Read that full article, here, at Psychiatric News. These are also good books on the topic of depression, by Kay Redfield Jamison: Nothing Was the Same, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, Exuberance: The Passion for Life, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide