Depression is a medical illness that negatively affects how you feel, how you think and how you act. Depression isn’t really a bad mood that you can get out of and having it means something is not functioning well in your brain.
It’s caused by having too little serotonin. (Serotonin is the key hormone that stabilizes our mood, feelings of well being and happiness)
Some symptoms of depression are:
- Feeling sad
- Loss of interest or pleasure in activities that are normally enjoyable
- Feeling worthless
- Difficulty sleeping or sleeping too much
- Difficulty concentrating and making decisions
- Suicidal thoughts
- Memory loss
- Overwhelming guilt
These symptoms can make it harder for you to function at work, school, in your relationship and life as well.
Depression shows itself in form of unhealthy psychological process like self-blame & rumination.
Psychologists today consider self-blame as a key symptom to depression because people who are more prone to depression don’t get an accurate picture of what they did wrong so they just feel guilty about everything.
On the other hand, rumination is basically brooding or getting stuck thinking about everything that led to and resulted from a negative experience and it’s strongly linked to both depression and anxiety.
Depressive disorders often include problems with cognitive function and this will affect your memory because you need cognitive resources to pay attention and remember things and when people with depression are using those resources to brood, they have trouble redirecting them towards the task at hand.
Depression is a complicated difficult illness but there are therapies and treatment that can help, hence recognizing the different ways depression manifests itself is an important step towards getting that help.
Author: Everlyne Malimo
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