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I can't really see depression as anything other than a physical illness.  Some of its symptoms are of the mind in the sense that a person experiences emotional and cognitive changes, but I believe that such changes are still the result of physical changes in the brain.  These changes are like changes to any other organ, except that they're capable of affecting someone on a level that we don't generally think of as "physical."  Using the term "depression" as if it were one illness, however, may not be accurate.  Depression may have a number of different causes, meaning that two people with depression may not necessarily respond to the same treatment.  I like the idea of depression being a symptom.  I think of it in the way we think of colds.  Because a virus is capable of rapid genetic change, the disease we call "the common cold" is really caused by many different, but related, types of rhinovirus or coronavirus.  The term "cold" really just refers to the collection of symptoms they all cause.  I'm sure just about everyone knows this, but we still use "cold" to mean the illness.  I think depression may work the same way.  As far as the sufferer is concerned, depression is truly a disease, but from a treatment point of view, it needs to be viewed as a symptom that may have many possible causes.  This has obviously made research extremely difficult; our understanding of the physical basis of depression is still developing, and pinpointing the cause in a specific person may not be easy.  As we discussed in class, the meta-analysis we read about barely scratched the surface of depression treatments.  The generalization made in the story that treatments are largely ineffective for many people is unfounded when depression is considered as class of many possible illnesses that manifest with similar symptoms.