Clinical depression
It is important to distinguish between being sad, grieving and suffering from a depressive disease. Everyone has felt sad at some point. Your existence then seems sad and insurmountable and the future looks hopeless. It's natural to feel sad and melancholy when you experience adversity and loss like for instance in the case of an unhappy love affair, unemployment or bereavement.
But when you are "naturally" sad, you don't come to a complete stop. You are able to take part in activities even though "your heart isn't in it". And when something good happens, you can still feel happy about it.
To be naturally sad is therefore not a disease. Sadness and bad moods will pass. Even if you are experiencing serious grief, it will affect you less with time. But perhaps your grief will never completely go away. You can do something yourself to help, and support from your family and friends will also help you. For you need to be with others and speak with other about your problems, in order to get better.
The disease depression
The disease depression - also called clinical depression - is a serious disease, where the depressive feeling becomes chronic and actually gets its own life. If you are suffering from depression, you are no longer in control over your mood or feelings. When you are depressed about almost everything, almost all the time, almost every day for several weeks or maybe months, you are suffering from depression. The depressed condition of your mind continues day after day and affects all areas:
- feelings
- thoughts
- behaviour
- the body's functioning
In the most severe cases, a depression can be life threatening, because you run the risk of coming to a complete stop, losing your appetite and not feeling thirst. You can also be feeling so low that you will contemplate suicide.
It is therefore important that people who suffer from depression receive treatment. By providing help with this, you can save another person's life. And if you think that you yourself are suffering from depression, you can actually save your own life by going to see your doctor and receiving treatment.
Different courses
Different courses of depression are distinguished in the following way:
- A single depressive episode
- Periodical depressions
- Chronic depression
- Bipolar suffering (manic-depressive disease)
A single depressive episode is a depression which will pass and in most cases doesn't recur.