I can’t help but wonder if being happy and well adjusted is somehow normal, given the state of our world and existence, being depressed is a highly rational response. I’m not a psychologist, but if true, I would look at all the anti-psychotic medications as just another way to kill the pain.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, especially, but then lets be honest about it.
Of course, by this logic, the Sane people are really crazy, and the insane are rational. Hm.
Depression is an emotional, not a rational, response.
Anti-depressants, not anti-psychotics, are used to treat chronic, severe depression.
You need to temper you logic with a few more facts before drawing conclusions.
I am taking both an antidepressant and an antipsychotic drug to keep me from living in an absolute state of depression/mania. I have been this way for most of my life. Watching the news and seeing the things that go on in the world does not make me more depressed. When I am really in a black hole I could win the lotto and still not want to get out of bed. I don’t think that the drugs I take are to kill the pain at all. By using them I can think rationaly and function normally. It’s without taking them my mind is a swirl of abnormal thoughts. BTW thanks Squink.
Reactive depressions are a normal part of life. Responding to stress and painful events by becoming sad and withdrawn for a time (days to months) is not necessarily abnormal. But it can be quite dysfunctional if it persists too long.
Endogenous depression is a disease. Here, outside life events do not correlate with internal emotions. Spending months or years feeling constantly hopeless, tired, joyless, and unable to anticipate or feel pleasure is not an illness I would wish on anyone.
Depression is normal in response to normal conditions. For example my mother dies I am depressed. This is normal. My mother dies and it is 20 years from that event and I am still just as depressed. This is NOT normal.
Antidepressents are NOT uppers as a lot of people think. They are mood stabilizers.
Whether you need antidepressents to overcome it is a mix of how bad is the depression and what you can tolerate.
For example I had anxiety attacks. They were amongst the worst. I used behaviour therapy to overcome them. It took 6 months and I didn’t use meds and I was fine.
About 10 years later they resurfaced. I took imiprimine for them. In days I was better. Could I have gotten the same results without meds? Probably, but why suffer.
I used to be staunchly antimed. You know the kind of guy who said “it’s just a headache it’ll go away.” And you know what it did. But I also suffered for hours when if I had taken a few aspirin I would’ve been fine in an hour or so.
You are correct the world IS a very depressing place and you cannot let that stop you from enjoying the happiness life CAN bring you. If you can’t bridge that something is wrong.
The best indicator of something being wrong is if you think it is.
Are you on meds? If so are they helping? If not why not? For instance bipolar illness is a mood disorder that severely effects thought. Schitzophrenia (sp?) is though disorder that severely effects mood. You can see how they often get misdiagnosed. They are treated in different ways.
To sum up No being depressed is not normal. Being happy all the time isn’t normal either.
It is a balance between the two that makes you well adjustd.
[note: Some people who are severely depressed or suicidal most defintely do need meds, if you feel like this see your doctor or community mental health center ASAP. It rarely gets better without help]
As Qadgop indicated there is clinical depression and just depression. Everybody gets depressed over life stressors now and then (reactive depression), which is really not a clinical depression. The features of clinical depression are as follows:
An affective disorder (depression or bipolar) is characterized by a disturbance of mood, accompanied by a full or partial manic or depressive syndrome. Mood refers to a prolonged emotion that colors the whole psychic life; it generally involves either depression or elation.
There must be a persistence, either continuous or intermittent, of one of the following:
a. Anhedonia or pervasive loss of interest in almost all activities; or
b. Appetite disturbance with change in weight; or
c. Sleep disturbance; or
d. Psychomotor agitation or retardation; or
e. Decreased energy; or
f. Feelings of guilt or worthlessness; or
g. Difficulty concentrating or thinking; or
h. Thoughts of suicide; or
i. Hallucinations, delusions or paranoid thinking; or
a. Hyperactivity; or
b. Pressure of speech; or
c. Flight of ideas; or
d. Inflated self-esteem; or
e. Decreased need for sleep; or
f. Easy distractibility; or
g. Involvement in activities that have a high probability of painful consequences which are not recognized; or
h. Hallucinations, delusions or paranoid thinking;
Masterful recap, Barb. Ever think of switching professions? BTW, do you live in Baltimore?
and Quick how would you feel if your funks lasted for 18 months?
To get back to your question of mere unhappiness, a couple of points:
Thanks, Qadgop. I live in Charleston, SC. About 20 years ago, after I lost my job at Chicago Title & Trust, I thought about going back to school and becoming an exercise physiologist. I landed this soft federal job, and have been taking life easy ever since.
Well said…many in the psychology field HAVE expressed your EXACT words! 
Everyone is crazy…
Anyhoo, reactive depression, as stated, is normal. Chronic depression is not. It often has no apparent reason, or even it if it does, it does not go away like it should, and it gets worse.
It’s true hell. Imagine nothing being able to bring you pleasure-not sex, not your favorite food, not a good movie, or winning the lottery. Nothing matters. YOu feel empty, and while you may not be suicidal, you just want to sleep all the time. You dread going out in public. YOu feel worthless, and moody, nauseous and achy.
No, I don’t take any medications, other than aspirin.
I don’t mean to offend anyone, but it seems as if everything is treated with meds these days, including our children. Just seems a littly wacky to me, that’s all. Hope you all feel better soon, if ill.
One interesting study a few years back found that mildly depressed people do in fact have a more accurate worldview than non-depressed people.
The researchers had several friends of each subject fill out a confidential questionnaire about the subject (“On a scale of one to ten, how honest is Joe?”, etc, etc). The subject was then asked to guess what his/her friends said about him/her on their questionnaires. The depressed subjects were fairly accurate in guessing their friend’s views, while the non-depressed subjects consistently guessed higher than their friends actual scores.
So there is some empirical support for Tedster’s OP.
Tedster, the theory of evolutionary psychology states that our minds, as well as our bodies, evolved to adapt to an environment we no longer living in, and that mismatch has lead to numerous mental illnesses. I think there may be some value to that. The stress we encounter on a day to day basis is nothing like what our ancestors ever had to deal with - 100 years ago, 1,000, or 100,000.
Whatever the cause, endogenous depression is very real. Levels of certain neurotransmitters - the emotion regulators of the brains - are measurably lower in people with depression. Depression depletes serotonin, neorepinephrine, and dopamine. Depression medications help the body restore a normal balance of these neurotransmitters. Once those chemicals balance again, the depression disappears.
Would we be better off if our psyches were more adapted to our environment, or if our environment returned to what we’re adapted to. Sure. Are you willing to go back to eating raw meat and sleeping in trees? I’m not.
No should you. Unhappiness during and following unhappy episodes is healthy behavior. It is when this is a prolonged state that you should seek medical attention. If you have questions, ask your doctor.
I know a lot of anti-medication people. It pains me to see someone with, for example, a chonic inflamatory condition that could be easily treated with buffered aspirin that has only positive side effects for all not allergic refuse treatment, and then the inflamation causes scarring and worsens the condition. Intelligent use of medication can make life much more pleasant and longer.
(I hope I read everyone’s responses okay with what I am going to state…)
First off, the clinically depressed do not necessarily need “anti-psychotic” medications. Most depression medications react on certain brain chemicals, of which flee my mind at the moment.
Being depressed is a simple matter of the blues, depression (clinical depression) is a full blown means by which a person’s brain chemicals have changed. This can happen to anyone at anytime. In many cases a person can use talk therapy to work through the pain in other cases the aid of medication (not anti-psychotic) will help in easing the brain to get back to it’s regular condition.
The distinction, from my own experience with my family and me being clinically depressed in the past is; my brother and I had the same exact experience of our mother’s death, I sunk into a depression that lasted many years that at some point required medication to pull me through as my brain chemistry had changed. Why it changed and his didn’t, I don’t know. I am ADD so I may be more prone to depression that he could ever be. We aren’t biologically connected, my brother and me, but somehow he was better able to handle that than me.
Now, consider that we both live very different lives. He is very successful in business and has a family of his own. He has found a level of happiness that come with difficulty in his life. You take my life and it’s very different, single, never married, no kids and has a hard time with social situations, even with family. It’s not so much, in my eyes, an environment thing as it is genetic. I understand my birth mother has many of the same problems I have and has also been treated for depression.
In either case, I honestly believe that being depressed and having clinical depression are very different ends of the scope. The blues versus unable to sleep or sleep too much, eat too much or not at all, alcoholism, drug use, thoughts of death, etc…the depressed person is dealing with a rough spot in life as we all do but the clinically depressed person feels very little joy in life. The depressed person has feelings of guilt, even for things they couldn’t control in life. The depressed person has sustained interupptions of anything that might bring joy to one that is a relatively normal person that can’t be shaken.
So I hope that helps answer your question. Yes, everyone has the blues but a genuine depression is feelings of dread and sadness for weeks and months on end.
< thankfully I am over my last depression…spent a lot of time making enemies and pissing people off around me but I got through it without drugs as my last experience with them really messed me up more. >
So…a person can be diagnosed as “clinicly depressed” if:
[list][li]Decreased activity or hyperactivity[/li][li]Difficulty thinking or flight of ideas[/li][li]Feelings of worthlessness or Inflated self-esteem[/li][li]Sleep disturbance (such as sleeping too much) or Decreased need for sleep Involvement in activites…or pervasive loss of interest in almost all activities.[/li][list]
No wonder those guys are writing so many prescriptions!
frinkboy, there’s a variant of clinical depression known as bipolar disorder (or is it a related disorder and not a variant at all?). The usual symptoms of depression are turned on their head. Lethargy becomes manic energy, hypersomnia becomes insomnia, and so on. That’s the manic side of things, and it’s no more fun than the depressive side. There’s also atypical depression where the same areas - sleep, energy, ability to enjoy commonplace activities - are affected in different ways.
Sometimes it’s easy for a doctor to spot, sometimes not so easy. Your comment, though, makes it sound as though doctors write prescriptions for anti-depression medication for anyone with any kind of symptom, and that’s just not the case.
Just to add my two cents since I’m rotating through psychiatry…
To establish a major depressive episode, you need to have sad mood or loss of pleaseure in things you would normally enjoy every day for two weeks or more. This differentiates it from “sad mood” (dysthymia).
Hypomania does indeed cause many of the symptoms listed and is responsible for many of the “contradictions” above. It can be very difficult to pick up since it is often much more subtle.
It is rational to be cynical about the world. It is not rational to go to bed crying every night and unable to concentrate on your job because pollution occupies all your thoughts. The issue here is not what issues cause a reaction but the degree of the reaction, and how this interferes with your life.
Although the brain has many chemicals, most drugs act on the dopamine, serotonin or norephinephrine systems, which are not completely understood. As Dr. Gerelman says, using Prozac to treat depression is like saying people have arthritis due to a deficiency of corticosteroids… there is not a perfect match between the clinical picture and the pharmacology, and in medicine you treat symptoms and not lab tests. Too many lay people assume that X-rays and lab tests are better than a good history and physical since you get a better idea… usually this isn’t true.
Depression, properly diagnosed, definitely needs treatment. Too often, this means using any of the relatively safe, effective drugs on the market. Sometimes, a little bit of sympathy, refocusing and behaviour modification is more appropriate. Sometimes, ECT or antipsychotics are a better choice, in certain patients. Not all depressions are equal, in fact, none of them are.
Tedster, many forms of depression are caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. Although depression can sometimes be triggered by an event, it often exists for no reason at all.
Not to disagree with Dr. Paprika, but too many behavioral therapists rely on what I call the “cheer up” treatment of depression. To me, that’s no more effective than telling someone with Parkinson’s disease to stop shaking. Long-term clinical depression is a lot more than just a bad attitude.