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In theory, the pain and isolation of depression, a psychiatric illness, is difficult for many people to understand. Depression, by definition, is a word that is used both for a sad, despairing mood and for a psychiatric disorder. Everyone occasionally feels blue or sad, but these feelings are usually fleeting and pass within a couple of days. Although many people with a depressive illness never seek treatment, however, the vast majority (even those with the most severe depression) can get better with treatment. When everyone feels sad, down or blue at times, often following a disappointment, loss of a loved one or other traumatic life event, this is actually viewed or considered as a normal reaction since our depressed moods usually lift fairly quickly as time goes by. However, a depressed mood can persist and become a more significant mental health problem to the point where the condition is commonly referred to as a clinical or major depression.

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WHAT IS A MAJOR DEPRESSION?

Depression is much worse than simple unhappiness. Major depression (also called clinical depression) is a mood disorder. This means that a person’s emotional state is abnormally low or sad, and the person cannot independently raise his or her mood. The main symptom of major depression is a sad despairing mood that persists beyond two weeks and impairs a person’s performance at work, at school or in social relationships. This profoundly low mood state, in fact, can be confusing because some of the symptoms of depression are behavioral, such as moving or talking slowly, while others are emotional and cognitive, such as feeling hopeless and thinking negative thoughts.

This is very different from the physical symptoms of other illnesses, like the pain of a broken leg or the fever from a serious infection since it is characterized by a combination of symptoms that interfere with a person’s ability to work, sleep, study, eat, and enjoy pleasurable activities. Bottom line, major depression (clinical depression) is disabling and prevents a person from functioning normally, and an episode of major depression may occur only once in a person’s lifetime, but more often, it recurs throughout a person’s life.