Hamlet’s question, “To be or not to be,” has been a meme since it was first uttered on an Elizabethan stage. That’s because being—existence—involves suffering. Life is hard. That truth centers much on human art, faith, and philosophy.

The reality of suffering doesn’t lessen the darkness of real depression. But it complicates the question of how to measure the normal despair, which philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre claimed life begins on the other side of. I wrote recently that I got diagnosed as mildly depressed by an online depression screening, though I was both honest in my answers and happy. The results page suggested I see my doctor.

Interested, I’ve taken two more online depression tests. Both ranked me mildly depressed and at the end of one, a chatbox popped up with a live person waiting “to talk.”

Is mental wellness detectable among the ordinary trials of ordinary life? And when surrounded by so much easily dispensed medication? In 1969, a psychologist named David Rosenhan entered a psychiatric institution called Haverford to test psychiatry’s ability to diagnose the well. Rosenhan published the results in the journal Science. His article “On Being Sane in Insane Places” begins, “If sanity and insanity exist, how shall we know them?”

How shall we?! My depression tests consisted of 10 to 13 questions. Each test ranked whether I’d been “bothered by” various states over the past two weeks on a scale of “not at all,” on “several days,” “more than half the days,” or “nearly every day.” Symptoms included things like feeling down, depressed, or hopeless; poor........

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