Most people think they know the symptoms of depression, but you would be surprised by how tricky thing get. You can be depressed for a long time without even knowing it. The most obvious symptoms of depression, of course, are known by everyone. The feeling of being sad all the time and unmotivated, having thoughts of suicide, and withdrawing from your friends are the best signs. But in reality, depression symptoms are much broader than this. People do their best to cope with being depressed, and so sometimes you can be in the middle of a rather severe malaise without even knowing it.
One of the most classic symptoms of depression, for example, is depressed mental function. A lot of the time, people who are depressed go around in a mental fog all of the time. They may not even be consciously aware they are depressed, but they can't seem to get anything done. Basically, rather than facing their feelings of anxiety and depression, they go into a listless state where they don't have to deal with anything. This kind of escapism can last for weeks, months, or even years.
There are even weirder symptoms of depression than that. I have a friend who was depressed for a while, but thought she was fine. The only thing that was wrong was that her body felt achy and she was tired most of the time. She convinced her self she was in a good mood, and that she was just suffering from some physical disease. What it really was, however, was a symptom of depression. She was unable to deal with the feelings of sadness over a breakup with a previous boyfriend, so instead she came down with physical symptoms of depression. She really thought that everything was okay, and that she was just coming down with some undetected illness. When she finally dealt with her feelings of depression, however, her physical symptoms cleared up as if by magic. That was the only way she was finally able to figure out that she had been depressed all along.
Some people even deal with depression by becoming overly excited. This can be confused with the symptoms of manic-depression, but it has an important difference. These people are not classically manic. They just learn to escape things by denying how bad they feel. They may go out and get drunk with friends, go the parties, and generally live it up as much as possible. They do it all to try to forget how depressed they are feeling. Unfortunately, eventually the depression catches up with them, often coupled with the consequences of self-destructive behavior. When it all hits a home, sometimes this drives them into an even deeper feeling of depression.
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