The blurring of the boundary between sanity and insanity has led to a view of normal men as creatures subject to psychopathological processes rather than leading to the exploration of the similarities and differences between groups of individuals and their experience. This paper takes this perspective by investigating in what way the experience of dysphoric mood in a group of depressed adolescents is similar to or different from that experienced by non-depressed adolescents?

The essential symptom of a ‘clinical depression’ is the presence of a relatively persistent dysphoric mood or anhedonia, the loss of interest or pleasure in most of one's usual activities. However, because normal people experience dysphoric moods from time to time, psychiatric diagnostic systems like the DSM-III-R (A.P.A., 1987) must distinguish between pathological variants of a depressed mood, characteristic of only a few people at particular times in their lives, and the normal emotional experience of a depressed mood, characteristic of many people from time to time. Accordingly, the use of the term ‘depression’ is often inexact. The distinction between depression as a syndrome and depression as a mood must be clarified. It can refer to a normal emotional experience, a state of dysphoria, or a clinical psychiatric syndrome.