When this happens, is this a reasonable sign that the depression is clinical? My understanding of clinical is that it's chemical.
"Clinical" depression is not depression that is caused by chemistry rather than psychology. We have no idea whose depression is caused by what, really, and chemistry/psychology probably isn't a meaningful distinction to make in this context.
As far as I know there is no expert consensus on whether depression and Depression are different shades of the same thing or qualitatively different.
'Depression is a chemical imbalance', as a model, is about on par with 'the internet is a series of tubes'. It's not flat out wrong, but it's so oversimplified as to be pretty useless for fixing or making predictions about the system.