5 key ideas for understanding depression

Major depression is a psychological disorder that is often explained through very vague and general concepts. To some extent it is not strange, since this psychopathological alteration is difficult to cover, given its complexity.

In this article we will see in more detail what this psychological disorder consists of, through a tour of several key ideas to understand what depression is.

• Related article: "The 6 types of mood disorders"

Key Ideas for Understanding Major Depression

With the most frequent psychological disorders, a lot happens that precisely because they are part of popular culture, it is easy for myths and conceptual distortions to arise about them. This also happens with depression, a psychopathology that practically everyone has heard of but few know its details well.

The latter is normal, of course; no one is obliged to know everything, especially in the face of knowledge sets full of nuances and complexities, as with the changing and variant nature (depending on the individual who develops them) of the disorders mental.

However yeah it is important to know at least some basic ideas about depressive disorders in general; thanks to this it will be easier to detect your symptoms quickly and seek professional help in time, help people from our environment that may be suffering this alteration, and even not blame themselves for the discomfort generated by the psychopathology.

In this sense, here you will find, as a summary, a series of key ideas that will help you understand what major depression is and how it behaves.

1. It is not a purely medical disease

All psychological disorders have part of their causes in biological processes that arise from the functioning of the body, and especially those that have to do with the nervous activity of the brain and with the production and regulation of hormones.

However, unlike what happens with diseases typically addressed by medicine, it is also true that a large part of the causes and triggers of depression are not biomedical, but psychosocial. While a viral infection or muscle injury can be analyzed and managed clinically taking into account certain molecular structures and cellular tissues that are only found in that individual, in psychological problems the problem cannot be reduced to what occurs in the interior of the person, but also extends to the context of him: the way in which he interacts with him in his day-to-day life, and the way in which he influences him.

For this reason, to overcome depression, it is necessary to intervene in the psychological processes that are reflected in the actions of the person. These actions can consist of observable patterns of behavior (such as spending many hours of the day without going out bed or sofa) and others that consist of mental processes (such as holding on to pessimistic beliefs about one same).

2. No one is to blame for suffering from depression

From what we have seen in the previous section, depression has a behavioral aspect. However, we should not fall into the mistake of assuming that every person who has developed depression is to blame for it.

We must not forget that the fact that something does not have solely biological causes does not mean that it is self-made, or that simply having made a series of decisions, psychopathology would not have arisen.

While many of the complications with biological causes that affect us are easily treatable (for example, vision problems treatable with glasses or with surgeries), numerous forms of psychological discomfort that affect us on a day-to-day basis appear in us from learning that we carry out automatically and unconscious, and despite the fact that they are given to us by our social interactions, we are incapable of "eliminating" them from the roots of our way of behaving and feel. For example, the effect of having lost a loved one, which would not exist if we had not developed an emotional bond with that person.

In short, that something has origins in the learning that we have been doing and in the behavior patterns that we have internalized it has nothing to do with our ability to control this psychological phenomenon, in the same way that certain medical disorders can be solved in a matter of hours and others last a lifetime.

• You may be interested in: "The 8 types of emotions (classification and description)"

3. The main emotion of depression is not always sadness

Many people believe that depression is something like sadness taken to the extreme, but this is not true. First, the difference between suffering from depression and not suffering from it is qualitative, not quantitative: it is not about experiencing a great deal of sadness or any other type of emotion normal, but to suffer symptoms that, as a whole, do not occur in people without health problems mental.

Second, many people with depression do not even use the term "sadness" to express what they feel: it is even more common to talk about disinterest, lack of motivation or hopelessness, referring to an affective flattening before which sadness would suppose a more intense emotion than one feel.

4. The problem is the discomfort, not the "label"

What you have to overcome is not "the label" of being a person with depression, but the discomfort itself. Psychological disorders are not an essential part of a person's identity, since if they were, there would be no reason to treat them, and on the other hand it is known that in most cases they are treatable and can be mitigated through therapy.

To say that someone has depression only means that he has developed a series of forms of discomfort that it is useful to call “depression” to understand how they work and offer solutions; This does not imply that the concept of "depression" is inseparable from the "I" of the person. In any case, what will be part of the identity of that individual is the set of actions that will take to relate to that disorder while the latter lasts.

5. Depression overlaps a lot with anxiety

Although everything related to depression makes us think of people "off" or with a passive attitude and a feeling of helplessness in the face of life, in practice their way of experiencing life is usually more complex.

For example, many people who have developed depression also have anxiety problems; This is what is known as an anxious-depressive picture. In cases like this, symptoms such as demotivation and hopelessness are combined with moments when the person experiences a high nervous activity that leads her to be in a "state of alert", attentive to the slightest sign that she has to react quickly to an potential danger.

Looking for psychological treatment for depression?

If you notice that you suffer from an emotional problem that negatively affects your quality of life, I invite you to contact me to start a psychotherapy process. I am a federated psychologist by FEAP and I have more than 20 years of professional experience treating people from the field of psychotherapy. Currently I do face-to-face sessions in my office in Seville and also online sessions by video call.