Was your alcoholic parents ever diagnosed with anything?
My father was apparently told that he has "depression" although I don't believe that he is or ever was depressed. I have never seen him exhibit any signs of depression other than just generalized rage. He was also diagnosed with AADD which I think if much more plausible. He claims OCD, but I think that is just a smoke screen to try to justify being a control freak and a jerk.
I believe that he has a personality disorder, either explosive personality disorder or Anti-social, and that the doctors told him that he is depressed as a way to get him to take his pills.
It makes me mad in a way that this "diagnosis" of depression just gives him one more way to minimize and distort things. He is able to dismiss years and years of profound, frightening, and dangerous mental illness with a harmless euphemism. Makes him sound almost like someone that we should all feel sorry for rather than the bizarre and violent lunatic that he actually was all those years. Instead he is just depressed, like all he needs is a hug or something.