Mental Depression

Moods or emotions change with experience and environment, sometimes reflecting happiness and other times sadness. In emotionally healthy individuals, moods are controllable, but for people with mental depression, the mood itself is in control of both body and thoughts. Mental depression is a mood disorder characterized by specific symptoms that typically occur due to chemical alterations in normal brain functioning. Mentioned throughout history, depression harks back at least since the days of the Old Testament, [Page 577]when King Saul was said to have suffered from it, causing him to take his own life. The most common and readily identifiable symptom of a depressed person is sadness, melancholy, or despair; however, a person with clinical depression experiences more than transient sadness. Oftentimes it is a sense of exhaustion or a lack of any energy at all that signals the onset of mental depression.

Mental depression is one of the clinically distinct depressive disorders. As a clinically defined disorder, its criteria is identified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders, 4th edition (DSM-IV) with specific questionnaires and diagnostic interview techniques available for therapists, doctors, and other mental health specialists to employ in an effort to identify clinical mental depression. Two important diagnostic features are severity and duration of symptoms. For a person to be diagnosed with severe depression, the symptoms must exist for more than 2 weeks and can be recurring or single episodes. Subtypes of major depressive disorders include depression with melancholy (loss of interest or pleasure in activities), depression with atypical features like weight gain or hypersomnia (sleeping to excessive amounts), or depression with psychotic features like hallucinations or delusions. Other types of depressive disorders include long-term mild depression called dysthymia; bipolar disorder, in which moods cycle from elation to depression; post-partum depression, which occurs after the birth of a child; and depression that accompanies menstrual cycles, more commonly known as premenstrual syndrome or PMS.