Clinical depression
The disease depression
The disease depression - also called clinical depression - is a serious disease, where the depressive feeling becomes chronic and actually has its own life. If you are suffering from depression, you are no longer in control over your mood or feelings. When you are depressed about almost everything, almost all the time, almost every day for several weeks or maybe months, you are suffering from depression. The depressed condition of your mind continues day after day and affects all areas:
- feelings
- thoughts
- behaviour
- body function
In the most severe cases, depression can be life threatening, because you run the risk of coming to a complete stop, losing your appetite and not feeling thirsty. You can also be feeling so low that you will contemplate suicide.
It is therefore important that people who suffer from depression receive treatment. By encouraging a depressed person to seek treatment, you can save the person's life. And if you think that you are suffering from depression, you should go to see your doctor to receive treatment.
Different courses
Different courses of depression are distinguished in the following way:
- A single depressive episode
- Periodical depressive episodes
- Chronic depression
- Bipolar suffering (manic-depressive disease)
A single depressive episode is a depression which will pass and in most cases doesn't recur.
Periodic depressions are reoccurring depressions, where a depression will recur after a period of time feeling well. In some cases, one depression can be followed directly by another without having any clear periods of being well.
In very few cases will a depression become so prolonged that it becomes chronic.
In bipolar suffering, depression and mania interchange. You are up and down between to extremes, hence the name bipolar ("between two poles"). A common depression can similarly be called unipolar, i.e. when it only concerns one "pole".