Gender

[Angrboda]

Do you think that most atheists dismiss the notion of clinical depression?

I can't speak for most atheists. 

I do know that clinical depression is something that can be tested and diagnosed. 

There was a group of doctors at my local prefectural hospital who did fMRI studies on severely depressed patients. They found significant and quantifiable differences in brain activity in severely depressed patients vs. undepressed people. (I am certainly not a doctor, but I did all their translation work for them, both when they read and when they wrote research papers, so for about 5 years there I read hundreds of such papers.) 

Some of the doctors were experienced diagnosticians, so if a new patient walked into the hospital and said "I am clinically depressed," the doctor wouldn't accept this self-diagnosis at face value. People may self-diagnose with things they've read about in the newspaper when their real trouble is something else. So after extensive interviews, the doctor might end with the conclusion that the self-report was not accurate, that in fact the patient had a different difficulty. It's sad to think that even in Japan, where health care is affordable, full evaluations are difficult to do. Someone might self-diagnose as clinically depressed when in fact they just live in a horrible family who bullies them. 

But there are a number of emotional and mental issues which fall in a sadly gray area, where objective testing is difficult or impossible. No one is saying that these should not be taken seriously.

Do you have a citation? It's been my understanding that no test is diagnostic for clinical depression and that as a result, self-reporting is the primary tool.

If you know otherwise then I'd like to read about it. In the meantime, I'd like to suggest the two are quite possibly very similar. Most tests for clinical depression are inconclusive and the factors which give rise to both gender and clinical depression are likely more practically inaccessible than inaccessible in principle. There's evidence that there are objective markers for gender and while we don't currently have the ability to determine gender scientifically, that doesn't mean that it isn't objective; that would be an appeal to ignorance.