My life is in shambles! If my life were a prime-time sitcom, this idiom would be our catch phrase. The amount of instances that my friends and I pepper our conversations with this colloquialism, is enough to render the sanest of mental capacities into a state of temporary lunacy. The problem with our verbose bemoaning of our seemingly deplorable life situations, is that more oft than naught, individuals from our generation have a predisposition for the dramatic. Perhaps an overabundance of prime-time sitcoms are to blame.
Allow me to illustrate my point, observe your peers for a period of time; soon your ears will begin to hearken to fantastical tales of abhorred teachers, foul classmates and the bane of every student’s existence: The evil incarnate, group projects! All these lamenting climaxes in your compatriot letting the d-word slip. No, not damnit – depressed. The culmination of their saga through daily struggle ends with their self-assured declaration that they are depressed.
However, if every schmuck who ever felt a moment of sadness was able to accurately diagnose the development of clinical depression, I would be without a future. The bottom line being, simply because you have endured a bout of sadness resulting from an abysmal test score or the cancellation of your favorite television program, does not merit you the credentials to accurately identify and diagnose clinical depression!
The dilemma that arises revolving this issue is the assumption by most individuals that by experiencing a sensation once, they are suddenly doctoral experts on the phenomenon. So I charge myself with the task of education. Hopefully I can unmask the mood disorder known as depression.
A prevalent misinterpretation by multitudinous individuals dipping into the study of psychology is mental disorders are limited in their destructive symptoms to the human psyche alone. This is an erroneous conception; mental disorders are equal opportunity wreckers. Depression alone can wreck negative symptoms on major areas of human functioning: Emotions, motivational drive, behavior, cognition and physiology. While sadness is a staple symptom of depression, sadness alone hardly merits an official prognosis. Traditionally accepted emotional symptoms of depression include feelings of general misery, a “hollow, empty” feeling, humiliation or shame, worthlessness and on the extreme end of the emotional spectrum – suicidal tendencies.
Emotions are not the only aspects of an individual suffering depression that are subjected to torment; the individual’s motivation deteriorates to near non-existence. The individual will lack the basic drive to complete daily tasks such as practicing hygiene, rousing in the morning for class and completing school assignments.
Motivational slump will also spread to affect the individual’s sense of spontaneity causing them to relinquish former personal interests and initiatives. These motivational distortions bleed into the behavioral effects that depression suffers experience, which encompasses a regression by the individual into a vegetative state of abnormal eating and sleeping patterns with little to no physical activity to supplement these behavioral turnovers.
Cognitively speaking, the individual will begin to foster negative thoughts regarding their dexterity to perform daily routine. Nugatory mistakes customarily attributed to human error, will be shouldered by the individual, who will hold themselves personally accountable for every misfortune that is endeared to us by simply living the human existence.
Concentration will also be impaired, rendering the individual unable to resolve daily decisions and plaguing the individual with extreme difficulty concerning the task of thinking. Finally a slew of biological disturbances ranging from a lack of energy to migraines and abdominal pain can scourge an individual suffering from depression.
Keeping in mind that I am no doctor, and the information I provided is rather like a crash course in identifying depression, hopefully it can help to demystify this condition that approximately 17 percent of the population will undergo at some interval in their life span. One must also bear in mind that to wholly meet the criteria for depression prognosis, at least five of the listed symptoms must be experienced consistently for at least a two week time span.
Stipulations aside, I can only hope that if nothing else, a clearer discernment of depression can be achieved and us, psychology majors, can sleep again at night knowing our future is secure.
