What is Depression?

What is Depression?

Everyone gets down from time to time. The death of someone we love, being fired, trouble with the boss, illness, divorce, the in-laws, silly domestic quarrels - on-one's life is perpetual sunshine, and feeling miserable is a normal response to setbacks. But this kind of mood is transient. When good times roll again, our mood lifts.

In contrast, the dreadful anguish of depressive illness or clinical depression is all-embracing, and it persists, sometimes for weeks or months, even when circumstances change for the better. Rather than snapping out of it, people get locked into it. A doctor usually makes a diagnosis of depression by running through a checklist of symptoms to distinguish a normal depressed mood from clinical illness. In theory, if you have more of these symptoms, you are more likely to have depression, if you don't, then you are not. Depression is not like most illnesses, in that its primary symptom - disturbances in mood - is relatively subjective.

Although there are many external signs of depression, both behavioral and physical, you can only answer that key question which is "How bad is it?". All a doctor can do to try and reach a diagnosis, is to try to elicit the answer out of you. So, depression is a condition where self-diagnosis is not only legitimate, but it can also be beneficial in itself. One of the many debilitating effects of depression is the feeling it engenders of being passive and helpless. The act of identifying your condition as depression may be the first step towards regaining a sense of control over your life.