Sadness is a common emotion that people often deal with – but when it's lingering and you notice that you are pulling back from doing things you'd normally do, and it's impacting your daily life, this may be depression.
Depression is different for everyone, which means the journey is different for everyone, but importantly, most people do recover. This recovery depends on the severity of symptoms, but typically starts with self-care strategies , connecting with family and friends and progresses to talking therapies, before anti-depressant medicine is seen as appropriate.
Seeking help early is hugely beneficial in the long-run. If people are able to maintain engagement with family, friends, school, work, and study (even with some ongoing mental health challenges) it significantly improves their long-term outcome. Finding the right support can take time and patience, but it's important to keep working at it until you find someone or something that works for you.
Which is worse: feeling profoundly sad, or feeling nothing at all? It's a difficult question that depression sufferers can grapple with daily. Because while we may think of depression in the mopey Eeyore sense, its symptoms can often be characterised by a lack of emotion rather than an abundance of it. Some people who experience depression lose interest in anything that once gave them pleasure, and life becomes hideously banal."It's such a slow, numbing effect that you don't notice it at first," says Sarah*, who has lived with mania and depression all her life. "You don't think 'I'm not happy,' and you just don't really feel anything but boredom or ennui. Nothing is fun anymore … you don't go out to movies, parties, all that, because you just think, what's the point?"This reduced ability to experience pleasure is called anhedonia (literally "without pleasure" in Greek), and it is a core symptom of depressive illness, alongside low energy and low mood. "About 90 percent of people with depression will experience anhedonia, explains psychiatry researcher Dr Christopher Davey, from Orygen, the National Centre of Excellence in Youth Mental Health. "They describe not feeling their usual affection for people close to them, and finding it hard to enjoy activities that they usually enjoy."Vikki Ryall, Head of Clinical Practice at headspace, the National Youth Mental Health Foundation
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Dr Davey says the root cause of anhedonia, like the root cause of depression, "is incompletely understood." More research is needed to fully understand the cause and progression of anhedonia. One theory researchers are exploring relates to the brain's "reward system". Some patients who suffer from anhedonia appear to receive no dopamine hit from experiences that are usually pleasurable: sex, food, music, social events. Other research investigates the contributions that social, cognitive, emotional and behavioural factors have on the experience of anhedonia.