Clinical depression is, simply put, a dreadful disease. Diagnosing it is anything but simple, however. Its symptoms vary, can shift with the ups and downs of everyday life, and sometimes overlap with those of other diseases. For these reasons, it is common for depression to go unidentified for months, or even to be missed altogether. Stefan Scherer of the University of Southern California and Louis-Philippe Morency of Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, hope to change this. They are trying to develop a reliable way of diagnosing depression by using a computer to record and analyse aspects of a putative sufferer's behaviour. They are, they think, 85％ of the way there.
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