Depression is a recognisable condition for a claim against group life and disability benefits if it is allowed under the rules of your retirement fund.
You must obviously also be assessed by doctors and found to be incapable of doing your job at the time of making the claim.
In a precedent setting decision this week, pension funds adjudicator, John Murphy, has ordered the Cape Town Municipal Pension Fund to cough up compensation for a pensioner who took early retirement because of severe depression.
The pension fund has to pay almost R46 000 to the pensioner before the end of June this year and also has to adjust his monthly pension.
This is what the pension fund member, referred to as S G, would have been entitled to had he been medically boarded at the date of his retirement, says Murphy.
S G had applied for early retirement on the grounds that he was suffering from depression, but his application was rejected by his pension fund.
The pension fund did not accept his state of mental health as a reason for early retirement.
In April this year, Murphy ordered a medical board to investigate S G's state of health before he retired to establish whether S G was entitled to ill-health benefits.
Murphy says the fact that S G was so depressed that he was on sick leave for almost eight months before his application for early retirement was a relevant consideration to which the pension fund had attached little significance.
S G consistently maintained that he was suffering from ill-health of mind, and for the trustees not to have investigated the true reason for S G's early retirement was "a dereliction of duty".
For the trustees to have come to the conclusion that S G was not ill, without constituting a medical board to investigate his condition"is unreasonable and an abuse of their discretion", says Murphy.
In a report to Murphy, three medical doctors found that S G suffered from a severe depressive disorder at the time of his retirement and that he was incapable of doing his job because of his mental state.