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Depression: Life
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Depression affects approximately 17 million Americans each year. Everyone at one time or another has felt depressed, sad, or blue. Being depressed is a normal reaction to loss, life's struggles, or an injured self-esteem. Left undiagnosed and untreated, depression can worsen, lasting for years and causing untold suffering, and possibly even result in suicide
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Depression often runs in families. This may due to your genes (inherited), learned behavior, or both. Even if your genes make you more likely to develop depression, a stressful or unhappy life event usually triggers the onset of a depressive episode.
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Depression can leave you feeling helpless and out of control of your life, your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. You want to regain and experience more power and control; you want to get to the point where you feel like you can do something to improve your situation and life.
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Many people with depression cannot experience emotions—including grief, joy, and pleasure—in a normal way; in the extreme, the world appears to have become colorless and lifeless. Thinking, speech, and general activity may slow down so much that all voluntary activities stop. Depressed people may be preoccupied with intense feelings of guilt and self-denigration and may not be able to concentrate. They may experience feelings of despair, loneliness, and low self-esteem. They are often indecisive and withdrawn, feel progressively helpless and hopeless, and think about death and suicide.
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Some people have described depression as a heavy black curtain of despair that envelops their lives. Depression affects your life, and the lives of those around you. It can severely disrupt how you function, eat, sleep, and get along with others. Although most people who suffer from depression feel as though they are suffering alone, roughly 20% of the American population suffers from depression. Depression is a disease, and like any other disease, it can be treated and managed. Read on to learn more about depression and what you can do to get help.
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COUNSELING, or psychotherapy, means talking about feelings with a trained psychologist who can help you change the relationships, thoughts, or behaviors that are causing the depression. Think about it, you feel depressed because you think your life is bad. What if you're wrong? What if you're missing all the good things around you? What if your future holds a lot more promise than you think? When you're depressed, you're in a rut, and you can't see anything good.
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