Saving Yourself from Clinical Depression: What You Need to Know

You have a blooming career, a promising job, or a business that is fast gaining ground. You enjoy a happy relationship or an enviable family life. You are fit and endowed with robust physical health. So, why are you feeling sad, even hopeless and helpless? Could you be depressed?

A Second Look at Clinical Depression

Clinical or major depression can make you feel extreme sadness, even when there is no rational reason. It can make you experience symptoms that disrupt the flow of your everyday life and relationships. It can worsen your feelings of shame and guilt. You may also drag your family down with you in your distress.

Depression is a medical condition, and you need treatment. Clinical depression and its symptoms will not dissipate on their own without professional assistance. Without treatment, it can push you to the verge of hopelessness and helplessness, and it can make a long-term impact on your life.

The Symptoms: Are You Depressed?

There are several forms of depression with varying levels of severity. One reason for the individual variability in the kind and intensity of symptoms is because of comorbidities:  depression can co-occur with other complicating emotional or physical issues, such as anxiety and substance abuse-related conditions.

Clinical depression is technically similar to major depressive disorder or unipolar major depression. For a clinical depression diagnosis, you must exhibit at least five of the following symptoms for two weeks or more:

  • Extreme sadness or depressed mood
  • Loss of pleasure or interest in most things or activities you used to enjoy
  • Sleeping less or too much
  • Eating too little or too much
  • Extreme tiredness or fatigue
  • Restlessness and agitation (fidgeting, pacing, hand-wringing) or retardation (slowing down of body movements, talking, and thinking)
  • Inability to focus or think clearly
  • Feelings of hopelessness, worthlessness, or excessive guilt
  • Persistent negative thoughts of self-harm or worse

Comorbidities and Other Subtypes of Depression

Aside from clinical depression, there are other subtypes of depression, such as:

  • Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)—Depressive symptoms usually appear in late fall to winter.
  • Depression with manic or mixed attributes—The manic symptoms include hyperactivity due to extra energy. Thus, they have the tendency to talk a lot, sleep little, and feel oddly excited or happy.
  • Anxious depression—Common symptoms of this type are pacing, excessive worrying, and other symptoms common to anxiety.
  • Depression forms that are situation-specific—These include postpartum blues/peripartum onset and premenstrual dysphoric disorder. The former may develop before or after childbirth and the latter may occur before menstruation.

Depression can develop alone, but can also be comorbid with other medical conditions. This is highly possible because having a chronic medical condition or other emotional condition can make you extremely vulnerable to feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, anger, and guilt.

Depression Can Grip Older Adults

Though depression isn’t a usual part of becoming an older adult, people are vulnerable to it in this life stage. Around this age, you are most likely retired and can be missing social interaction, which is important in any person’s life. You may be suffering from a chronic age-related disorder such as diabetes, hypertension, a neurodegenerative disease, or a heart condition. You may also be in pain or experience limited movement due to arthritis, tendonitis, or osteoporosis.

Many depressed older adults are reluctant to seek help, thinking that it is normal for people their age to be sickly, weak, and unhappy. They often stay home and let their condition go undiagnosed and untreated. But there is life after 60, 70, or 80 beyond the doors of your home and outside your family.

Overcoming Depression

If you feel like there is no logical reason to feel wretched, but you do, call Carolina Counseling Services – Sanford, NC, as soon as possible. While courage and determination are necessary to overcome depression, remember that it is a medical condition that requires professional help.

Seeing a therapist independently contracted with Carolina Counseling Services – Sanford, NC, means getting a methodical diagnosis. Symptoms of depression can be from mild to severe.  Even though many people experience mild depressive symptoms, as a matter of protocol and to determine if you pose a risk to yourself or others, your therapist will also assess whether you are vulnerable to self-harm or have alarming, morbid thoughts. Your treatment will depend on the results of the assessment and evaluation of your symptoms.

The diagnosis and treatment of your depression are best left to the able hands of trained therapists. This is the kind of help that you will get when you call Carolina Counseling Services – Sanford, NC.

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