Depression is now recognised by the World Health Organisation as the world-wide commonest cause of disability and death..... How can we understand this epidemic of human misery, and in what ways can psychotherapy contribute to the understanding the causes and tr eatment of depression?....Jeremy Holmes looks at the range of psychotherapies, cognitive, systemic and psychoanalytic, and their contributions to this debate. The key sociological variable in understanding depression is loss: bereavement, loss of status, loss of connectedness and community.....Freud saw vulnerability to loss as intrinsic to the human condition, and consequence of the oedipal situation in which the mother has to be shared with father and siblings. In her concept of the 'depressive position' Melanie Klein described the positive aspect of this tragic vision - the capacity to become depressed indicates concern for others and the beginnings of the realisation that attachment and loss are two