Is Major Depression Overdiagnosed or Underdiagnosed?

This video discusses Major Depressive Disorder and how it could be overdiagnosed and underdiagnosed. One of the confusing elements around overdiagnosis is the definition. The definition of over diagnosis and mental health is different than we see in medicine. The definition for overdiagnosis originated in medicine and now we use it in mental health, however, they really do not mean the same thing. An overdiagnosis in medicine is actually a correct diagnosis that occurs in an individual who would never develop symptoms or die from the disorder. In mental health the way we use overdiagnosis is usually to mean an unacceptably high false positive rate. Using major depressive disorder as an example, this would be when an individual does not have major depressive disorder, but they are assessed and the assessment shows that they do have the disorder. So in actuality they do not have it, however the assessment indicates they do. That is a false positive. An overdiagnosis would occur when the false positive rate becomes unacceptably high. Underdiagnosis in mental health would be an unacceptably high false negative rate. In a 2013 study with a large sample over 5000 participants who had been diagnosed with major depressive disorder, only about 38% of the participants were correctly diagnosed with major depressive disorder. About 62% of his individuals would represent a false positive. The same article also discussed underdiagnosis as a problem with major depressive disorder.