I downvoted GP assuming that indeed the GP would tell a depressed person to "stop externalising a blame" and "grow up".
Which is actually quite a good advice for depressed people. Repeat it enough times and watch suicide rate grow rapidly... And depression rates declining!
On a more serious note, people need to understand that the perceived "only in the mind" problems are actually illnesses which are much more deadly than many physiological ones. And that, by telling such things as "stop externalising a blame" (which depressed person doesn't do, anyway), you become partially responsible for the suicide if it happens. Yes, YOU GP are responsible, stop externalizing a blame and live with it. Or better yet, stop spouting nonsense.
Having suffered from very mild depression from time to time, my view on people suggesting that depression not be seen as an illness is that it's something of a red herring, at least in terms of practical solutions.
If in some strange world someone decided that a broken leg wasn't a medical condition, it wouldn't change the impact if had on the person suffering from it. Someone still couldn't run it off just because it's not deemed a medical condition.
Similarly people may view depression as an illness or not but that shouldn't make the believe that reclassifying it suddenly means that someone can just pull them self together.
Speaking personally in the situation I was in you could certainly tell me that but the very best that would have happened is that I could have pretended to be OK for a bit, before relapsing worse than before (which happened several times, not because people told me to pull themselves together but because life just didn't give me the bandwidth to do anything else).
Similarly telling an alcoholic that they're wrong about the nature of their problem does next to nothing to actually address it - it's just meta discussion.
