Maybe your thinking that this is such an easy question to answer and wonder why even bother to post about it, the reason is because there are a lot of people in the world who don’t know exactly what depression is, what people who suffer from clinical depression are going through. It may be a basic and common question and a common post but i think it is important to answer as there are people that don’t know what depression is. So with this post i hope to give some information on depression and what it is.
Everyone suffers from depression at some point in time during their life but the difference is that it goes away, or passes. With clinical depression the depression doesn’t go away or it keeps coming back. There are varying degrees of depression from mild to severe. Hopefully by presenting you with information on depression you will have a better understanding. Depression affects your body, emotions, and thoughts. The effects are negative giving physical symptoms, making you feel emotionally unwell, feeling worthless and hopeless, and can include thoughts of self harm or even suicide. Depression can affect the way you eat, your sleep and the way you feel about yourself. These affects can last weeks, months or even years.
Try to remember the most depressed you’ve ever felt. Then imagine it lasting for months, never going away and how that may affect your life after a period of time. Sure it may be easy to continue with your life at the beginning, but eventually it wears down on your energy, your mood can only be faked for so long and with the loss of energy you loose the ability to pretend everything is ok. Add into that lack of sleep or not being able to get up in the mornings, and a loss of appetite or eating more. After a couple of months it takes it’s toll on you and without help you start secluding yourself, thinking that you are worthless, no one wants you around, there’s no reason for you to live, no one needs you. Carry those thoughts for months and you truly begin to believe these things to be true and become hopeless. Given time the pain is so great that you start thinking about harming yourself just for the simple reason to give a different type of feeling, a different pain, so you start to cut yourself. You find it gives you some relief and every now and then you continue to cut yourself where no one can see it.
But as time goes on your thoughts and feelings only get worse and your mind has twisted your thoughts to negative thinking which affects your mood. You just can’t take it anymore, you can’t take the sadness that never leaves, the loneliness that is felt even when others are present, The only thing you have to look forward to during the day is sleep as that is the only time you get any peace. You start to have your first suicidal thoughts. They may be vague at first, fleeting thoughts but as time goes on and there is no relief the thoughts become stronger and stay longer. Then you get to a point where you cannot take it anymore, nothing in life makes you feel happy, your not even living a life, and so you make an attempt at suicide.
This is not the way it works for everyone as everyone is different, but this is a general outline of depression and what it does to you and your life. You may stop going to work and lose your job or drop out of school because you just can’t stand being in public anymore or you just don’t have the energy to get out of bed. Depression is not something you can just snap out of. There are many treatments for depression and everyone is different, what works for one person may not work for the other.
