Condition : Depression

Condition Depression

What is depression?

It’s common to feel sad, fed up, or hopeless for a few days, but if those feelings last for weeks or months and are affecting your work, social, or family life, you may be depressed.

Depression can affect people in different ways, both psychologically and physically. Some may experience symptoms more often than others, or for longer periods of time, the severity can vary, and the impact it has on everyday life will be different for each person.

Symptoms can include:

having low self-esteem (feeling worthless, lacking confidence, or having a poor opinion of yourself)
feeling tearful
feeling irritable and intolerant of others
losing interest in things, lacking motivation, or neglecting your hobbies
feeling anxious or worried
having suicidal thoughts or thoughts of harming yourself
moving or speaking more slowly than usual
changes in appetite or weight (usually decreased, but sometimes increased)
unexplained aches and pains
lack of energy
low sex drive (loss of libido)
finding it difficult to fall asleep at night or waking up very early in the morning

When severe symptoms of depression are combined with hallucinations and delusional thinking (the symptoms of psychosis), this is known as psychotic depression.

Grief

Grieving is often confused with depression as it can have some of the same symptoms. The main difference is that grief is a natural response to a loss that usually improves over time, while depression is an illness that lasts for a long period and may not have an obvious cause or starting point.

For some people, grieving can lead to depression.

What causes depression?

The trigger for depression will be different for everyone, and often there will be more than one.

Upsetting or stressful life events, such as a bereavement, divorce, illness, job loss, or money worries, are often a trigger for depression, but people will describe the lead-up to depression as a ‘downward spiral’, because one trigger can lead to another. For example, the breakdown of a relationship means you need to find somewhere new to live, and this might then cause financial challenges, as well as loneliness if you must move away from friends and family.

Other factors that put you at increased risk of depression include:

having a parent or sibling who has had depression
having certain personality traits, such as being overly self-critical (either due to genes or early life experiences, or both)
pregnancy and giving birth (antenatal and postnatal depression)
being sensitive to seasonal patterns, usually winter (seasonal affective disorder (SAD), also known as ‘winter depression’)
drinking too much alcohol or using drugs
long-term illness
head injury
loneliness
menopause (when your periods stop due to lower hormone levels)

Sometimes, depression may be a symptom of another medical condition, such as generalised anxiety disorder (GAD), hoarding disorder, premenstrual syndrome (PMS), or bipolar disorder.

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