The Difference of Emotions: Our Biases and Depression

Depression is an isolating pain. A pain affecting the soul, a pain that consumes all hope and leaks away pleasure and ambition. Individuals impacted by it have described the experience as: "Most closely connected to drowning or suffocating- but those images are off mark"- Styron and "The word depression is a wimp of a word for such a beastly experience."

First let's define some terms! Emotions are short lived, intense and triggered experiences whereas mood is a global feeling that colours an individual's perception. Mood can influence emotions. It is vital to know that there is a stark difference between a person who is depressed about something and a person who is globally depressed!

So why is it that the word "depression" in mainstream media and common conversation is overused to describe "just feeling low" and what is the harm of this? 

We express our emotions through a wide variety of words. The statement "I am sad" was not an uncommon way to speak about such emotions; but with the evolving years the term "sad", similar to "happy", has begun to lose its true place. It has become a common word, a word that doesn't seem to encompass the entire experience of sadness. And rightfully so, our experiences are all different. But here, we start incorporating stronger phrases, phrases such as "I am depressed". Following the flow of things, it hasn't taken long for the phrase and everything associated with it to become more and more status quo. Feeling depressed is all of a sudden a normal, transient feeling. One that anyone can "get over". This way of thinking is harmful because it washes away the experience of a person feeling truly depressed and invalidates their mental health condition. This stigma hinders the ability to seek help and effectively recover. 

Depression disorders are real, organic conditions of the psyche of a person. There are many things that can hinder with the levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain. Thus depression mood disorder is beyond the expression of the emotion sadness as a reasonable reaction to an event in life. The inflicted persons are truly in pain and suffering. This is not a mood that one can just "get over". The cause is complex and the path to recovery is not straightforward. If anything, the path is full of painful hurdles that need to be overcome and at any point the person can stagnate or start reverting if not closely monitored.

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Illustration by Robert Carter, depicting what depression feels like. Many patients have described a feeling of entrapment and inability to ignore the internal cues. These internal cues can become so distressing that they become a risk factor for life. 

Depression disorders in medicine are diagnosed using the DSM-V criteria. This criteria tries to capture the experience of depression outside of stressors, substance use and medical conditions. The term used is "Major Depressive Episode" to describe a two week incident of non-stop symptoms and "Major Depressive Disorder"  if continuous episodes and the doctors have ruled out other psychiatric illnesses. So as you can see, there is a process to diagnosing depression disorder. It is not as simple as labeling a low emotion especially one secondary to life stressors as depressed. 

Opening our eyes to our own biases and perspectives is even more important today, where mental health is a true crisis. We can only empathize with individuals struggling with mental health by taking a moment to recognize the importance of individual experiences and stopping ourselves from labeling emotions as "nothing to worry about" or transient. Every emotion matters and being reflective of your own or others' accounts of emotion can truly go a long way in today's day. 

                                                                                        ~ D & R