[On clinical diagnosis of depression]

In this paper, diagnosis of depression was deliberatively considered from a view of psychopathological studies, and problems of operational diagnostic system in psychiatry were discussed. For good clinical practices, 1) diagnosis must be considered as a part of clinical practices. 2) diagnosis must be closely related to therapeutic works, 3) the process of making a diagnosis itself should be managed to be remedial, and 4) a clinical category is expected to contain not only a summation of individual cases, and at the same time the link between the category and individual cases should not be abandoned. The author also discussed about some clinical maneuvers.