Category: Depression

Ten signs of depression include sadness, changes to sleep patterns, weight change, poor concentration and self-medication.

Depression is a very complex state which is why the signs of depression are wide-ranging.

Depressed people feel helpless, hopeless, worthless and that their lives are out of control.

Many people are depressed without realising it.

Signs of depression are certainly much more than just feeling sad.

It’s not a disease that a person either has or doesn’t have.

Like most mental conditions it exists on a continuum — in this case from mild to severe.

Symptoms of depression can last for weeks, months or even years.

10 signs of depression

In general people who are depressed often feel that life is hopeless, that their lives are worthless and they are out of control.

Since the mind and body are so intimately connected, many of the symptoms are not purely mental.

For a positive diagnosis, a person would be experiencing some of the following signs of depression almost every day.

1. Sadness, low mood and anxiety are signs of depression

Sadness, low mood and anxiety can be signs of depression.

It could include crying for no reason.

In depression some combination of these negative feelings usually persists for at least a couple of weeks.

2. Low motivation is a sign of depression

A general loss of interest in things a person used to find enjoyable.

It could include loss of sex drive or interest in work, socialising and hobbies.

3. Low energy is one of the signs of depression

A feeling that normal daily tasks are too exhausting.

It may also include being unable to get out of bed at the usual time, speaking slowly and having unexplained aches and pains.

4. Changes to sleep patterns

People who are depressed often find their sleep is disrupted. They have difficulty getting to sleep and may wake frequently in the night.

5. Poor concentration is a sign of depression

Finding it hard to make decisions or finding that negative thoughts take over the mind.

As a result, people with depression can also feel very restless or impatient.

6. Hopelessness and helplessness

Thinking “What’s the point?” and seeing little hope for change in the future.

Depressed people often describe feeling ’empty inside’ as well as out of control.

7. Weight changes are signs of depression

People with depression may lose weight or gain weight depending on how they respond.

The weight change, though, can be an important sign of depression.

8. Thoughts of death are signs of depression

While thinking about death occasionally is normal, becoming preoccupied with it is less so.

Depression can lead to an unhelpful focus on death.

Self-harm or suicidal thoughts may follow.

9. Worthlessness and guilt

Depressed people blame themselves for their situation.

This lowers their self-esteem and creates feelings of guilt and worthlessness.

10. Self-medication can be one of the signs of depression

Using alcohol, cigarettes or other drugs more than usual can be a sign of depression.

Signs of depression are difficult to spot

Since it can come on gradually, the signs of depression may be difficult to spot.

That’s why many people do not realise there is a problem until it is pointed out by someone else.

Some of the most common symptoms of depression that many report, but which people appear not to know are signs of depression included:

1. Poor appetite.
2. Problems sleeping.
3. Lack of concentration.
4. Restlessness.
5. Feeling overwhelmed.

Depression is often classified into mild, moderate or severe, depending on its impact on daily life.

Mild depression has some impact on daily life, moderate has a significant impact and severe depression makes it very hard to get through the day.

Depression is often classified into all sorts of sub-types and is frequently found with other mental health problems.

Most people who have an episode of depression are able to recover and be symptom free, but it depends on the severity.

However, 50 percent of people who have an episode of major depression go on to have at last one more episode.

Signs of depression in young people

Few young people use the word ‘depressed’ to describe what often looks like depression, research reveals (Defrino et al., 2017).

Instead they refer to being ‘stressed’ or ‘down’.

Dr Daniela DeFrino, study co-author, said:

“Much of what a teen is feeling and experiencing is easy to attribute to the ups and downs of teen angst.

But, sometimes, there is so much more under the surface that can lead to depression.”

Three common depression symptoms the teenagers in the study reported were:

1. Trouble falling asleep as well as sleeping too much.
2. Feeling more angry and irritable with other people.
3. Losing interest in things they used to enjoy.

Dr DeFrino said:

“Teens rarely stated they were depressed, but described bursts of feeling stressed and sad that often came and went.

For example, a teen might say, “I always find somehow to go back to stressful mode,

I get really mad at people very easily.

They don’t understand why I’m upset.

Sometimes I don’t either.””

The teenagers described a wide variety of sources of stress.

Common problems were with homework and expectations of success.

Other sources of stress were arguments with parents and verbal and emotional abuse.

In some cases teenagers were upset about deaths and illnesses in their family.

Two-thirds of teens had visited their doctor for physical problems like ulcers, stomach pains and migraines.

Dr DeFrino said:

“Teens may be experiencing a lot of internal turmoil and difficult life stresses that we can easily overlook if we don’t probe with sensitive questioning and understanding.

Reframing these feelings as outward symptoms of pre-depression by the primary care provider would allow for connection to and discussion about the importance of mental health with the teen and parent.”

More subtle signs of depression

While the signs of depression listed above cover the main symptoms, depression has all sorts of other subtle effects on a person’s mental and physical state.

While these signs of depression are lesser known, they can be pervasive.

1. Depressed people have no specific goals

People who are depressed have a tendency to over-generalise and abstract (“It’s all the same to me, I don’t care…”).

That’s why depressed people tend to have more generalised goals than those who are not depressed (Dickinson, 2013).

For example, depressed people may say to themselves: “I want to be happy,” but this gives no indication about how it will be achieved.

Non-depressed people, in contrast, are more likely to have specific goals like: “I will keep in touch with my family by phoning them once a week.”

Since they are so precise, specific goals are more likely to be achieved than generalised goals.

2. Rumination is one of the signs of depression

One important sign or symptom of depression is rumination: when depressing thoughts roll around and around in the mind.

Unfortunately you can’t just tell a depressed person to stop thinking depressing thoughts; it’s pointless.

That’s because treating the symptoms of depression is partly about taking control of the person’s attention.

One method that can help with this is mindfulness.

Mindfulness is all about living in the moment, rather than focusing on past regrets or future worries.

A recent review of 39 studies on mindfulness has found that it can be beneficial in treating depression (Hofmann et al., 2010).

3. Blurred memory is a sign of depression

One of the lesser known symptoms of depression is its adverse effect on memory.

Over the years studies have shown that people experiencing depression have particular problems with declarative memory, which is the memory of specific facts like names or places (Porter et al., 2003).

Part of the reason for this may be that depressed people lose the ability to differentiate between similar experiences (Shelton & Kirwan, 2013).

It’s another facet of the tendency to over-generalise.

Depression blurs other types of memory as well, though, including the ability to recall meanings and to navigate through space.

4. Depression makes it hard to remember the good times

Precisely because of memory difficulties and depressed mood, it can be difficult for depressed people to remember the good times.

One technique that can help is creating an emotional ‘memory palace‘: a mental store of specific happy memories to travel back to when times are hard.

5. Depressive realism

There’s some evidence that the way in which the depressed view the world is more accurate than the non-depressed: this theory is called depressive realism.

Non-depressed people tend to be a little too optimistic: they think they’ve performed better in tasks than they really have and predict better performance than they actually achieve in the future (Moore & Fresco, 2012).

Depressed people, in contrast, appraise their own performance more accurately.

So, in some ways, people experiencing depression are more realistic.

6. Physical pain is a sign of depression

Adding insult to injury, it seems people who are depressed may also experience higher levels of physical pain.

A recent study found that those induced into a depressed state were less able to cope with pain (Berna et al., 2010).

The lead author, Dr Berna explained:

“When the healthy people were made sad by negative thoughts and depressing music, we found that their brains processed pain more emotionally, which lead to them [to] find the pain more unpleasant.”

Depression is on the rise

Americans are more depressed now than they have been in decades, even if they don’t know it, research finds (Twenge, 2014).

Data from 6.9 million adults and adolescents from across the US found that Americans now report more symptoms of depression than similar studies in the 1980s.

Compared to their counterparts in the 1980s, teens in the 2010s were 38 percent more likely to have memory problems and 74 percent more likely to have trouble sleeping.

Teens were also twice as likely to have seen a mental health professional about these issues.

Amongst college students, 50 percent said they were overwhelmed, while adults reported poor sleep, lack of appetite and feeling restless.

All of these are classic signs of depression.

Dr Jean Twenge, the study’s author, said:

“Previous studies found that more people have been treated for depression in recent years, but that could be due to more awareness and less stigma.

This study shows an increase in symptoms most people don’t even know are connected to depression, which suggests adolescents and adults really are suffering more.”

Depression treatment

Mild depression may go away by itself or with a little self-help therapy.

For moderate and severe depression, talking therapies are often used in conjunction with medication.

Talking therapies change thinking style

One of the aims of talking therapies is to change depressed people’s thinking style.

People commonly think that depression is at least partly caused by big, bad life events.

This is true, but depression is also about the way people react to those events and indeed, ordinary, everyday stressors.

In one study, participants who had big emotional reactions to relatively small events were most likely to have suffered depressive symptoms when they were followed up ten years later.

The importance of thinking style, in addition to genetics and circumstances, is backed up by another recent study finding that how people thought about their problems influenced the levels of depression they experienced (Kinderman et al., 2013).

Lead author, Professor Peter Kinderman explained:

“Whilst we can’t change a person’s family history or their life experiences, it is possible to help a person to change the way they think and to teach them positive coping strategies that can mitigate and reduce stress levels.”

Exercise treats depression

It’s very clear that exercise makes you feel better for a short period, but can it really treat depression in the long-term?

A new review of 26 years of research finds that it can.

These studies suggest that not only does exercise make people feel better in the moment, but it also helps to stop future episodes of depression (Mammen & Faulkner, 2013).

It’s little wonder that many have called for exercise to be prescribed by physicians for depression.

.

Depressed eyes are difficult if not impossible to spot, but this eye colour is linked to a seasonal form of depression.

Depression cannot be spotted in the eyes alone, however eye colour may provide certain clues.

That is because people with brown eyes are more likely to get depressed with the seasons, mostly in the winter, research finds.

Women with brown eyes are particularly at risk as women are 40 percent more likely to experience the condition than men.

Those with blue eyes, though, seem to be have a level of protection against what is known as Seasonally Affected Disorder (SAD).

People with SAD — a form of depression — generally start to feel down from around fall and the symptoms continue through the winter months.

SAD has also been linked to weight gain from a craving for carbs.

The study’s authors write:

“Individuals with blue eyes appear to have a degree of resilience to SAD.

This may be taken as suggestive that the blue eye mutation was selected as a protective factor from SAD as sub-populations of humans migrated to northern latitudes.”

Depressed eyes

In other words, people with blue eyes historically tended to live in the North so their genetic make-up is more resilient to the cold, dark winters.

Professor Lance Workman, study co-author, said:

“We know that light entering the brain causes a decrease in levels of melatonin.

As blue eyes allow more light into the brain, it may be that this leads to a greater reduction in melatonin during the day and this is why people with lighter eyes are less prone to SAD.”

The study’s results came from a survey of 175 students in Wales and Cyprus.

The researchers found that around 8 percent of people in their study had a chronic version of SAD, while 21 percent had a less serious version of it.

The study was presented at the annual conference of the British Psychological Society in Nottingham, United Kingdom (Workman et al., 2018).

Rumination is the habit of going over depressing events from the past in the mind and it can be very bad for mental health.

Rumination — thinking about the causes and consequences of depressing events — is common in depression.

Repetitive thinking like this is often driven by the desire to understand what is happening to us and how that can be changed.

What is rumination?

Rumination can be thought of like the brain’s problem-solving mechanism gone wrong.

When people ruminate, they can find it very difficult to stop.

It differs from problem-solving as no problem is ever solved.

Unfortunately, repetitive thinking about stressful events means reliving them, which is depressing.

Professor Roger Hagen, an expert on rumination, explains:

“Anxiety and depression give rise to difficult and painful negative thoughts.

Many patients have thoughts of mistakes, past failures or other negative thoughts.”

Rumination plays a large role in how depression arises and is maintained.

Signs of rumination

The main signs and symptoms of rumination and repetitive thinking are:

• Focusing on a problem for a long time
• Feeling worse afterwards than before
• Failing to accept or move on
• Not reaching a solution

The causes of rumination

Traumatic life events are the single largest cause of anxiety and depression.

However, whether a person becomes anxious or depressed depends on their mental approach to these events.

After traumatic life events, which are the single largest cause of depression and anxiety, the next largest causes are a family history of mental illness and low income and low education levels.

Both social factors and relationship status have smaller effects on the risk of depression and anxiety.

How to stop ruminating

It can be hard to get out of a pattern of rumination.

However, here are some techniques that may be helpful to stop ruminating:

1. Plan for the time when you start ruminating. Decide how you will deal with it in advance.
2. Distract yourself: choose to do something else instead of ruminating. Have activities ready to hand.
3. Challenge your thoughts: ask whether the thoughts you are having are really accurate and how another person who is fresh to the situation would view them. Are they reasonable thoughts?
4. Try mindfulness meditation: it can help to control ruminative thoughts.
5. Spend time in nature: a 90-minute walk in nature can reduce rumination.
6. Avoid triggers: media or people who are likely to set off rumination should be avoided.

Therapy for repetitive thoughts

Ultimately, the most effective way of dealing with rumination that will not go away is therapy.

During therapy, people learn to deal with rumination more effectively.

One strategy is learning that thoughts are just thoughts and do not reflect reality.

Like any thoughts, they can be allowed to float away without causing distress.

Metacognitive therapy is one option for dealing with rumination.

One of the problems in depression is that people…

“…think too much, which MCT [metacognitive therapy] refers to as ‘depressive rumination’.

Rather than ruminating so much on negative thoughts, MCT helps patients to reduce negative thought processes and get them under control.”

Taking control of your thoughts is an important part of many modern cognitive therapies.

One study found that when people learned to reduce how much they ruminated, 80 percent had recovered after six months (including 10 weeks of therapy).

Simply realising that you don’t have to ruminate can be liberating.

Professor Hagen said:

“Instead of reacting by repeatedly ruminating and thinking ‘how do I feel now?’ you can try to encounter your thoughts with what we call ‘detached mindfulness.’

You can see your thoughts as just thoughts, and not as a reflection of reality.

Most people think that when they think a thought, it must be true.

For example, if I think that I’m stupid, this means I must be stupid.

People strongly believe that their thoughts reflect reality.”

Many patients who took part in the study were pleasantly surprised, said Professor Hagen:

“The patients come in thinking they’re going to talk about all the problems they have and get to the bottom of it, but instead we try to find out how their mind and thinking processes work.

You can’t control what you think, but you can control how you respond to what you think.”

The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology (Hagen et al., 2017).

This small change to your diet could be enough to reduce the risk of depression.

A Mediterranean diet including fruits, vegetables and legumes can prevent depression, a large study finds.

People only had to make relatively small changes to see the benefits.

The scientist think that depression could be partly down to a lack of essential nutrients.

The study included 15,093 people who were followed over 10 years.

People who reported eating more nuts, fruits and vegetables were considered to be following the Mediterranean diet more closely.

Those who ate more meats and sweets were considered to be moving away from the healthy diet.

The benefits of the diet are likely related to higher levels of omega 3 and other essential nutrients.

Dr Almudena Sanchez-Villegas, who led the research, said:

“We wanted to understand what role nutrition plays in mental health, as we believe certain dietary patterns could protect our minds.

These diets are all associated with physical health benefits and now we find that they could have a positive effect on our mental health.

The protective role is ascribed to their nutritional properties, where nuts, legumes, fruits and vegetables (sources of omega-3 fatty acids, vitamins and minerals) could reduce the risk of depression.”

Relatively small dietary changes were enough to reduce depression risk, Dr Sanchez-Villegas explained:

“A threshold effect may exist.

The noticeable difference occurs when participants start to follow a healthier diet.

Even a moderate adherence to these healthy dietary patterns was associated with an important reduction in the risk of developing depression.

However, we saw no extra benefit when participants showed high or very high adherence to the diets.

So, once the threshold is achieved, the reduced risk plateaus even if participants were stricter with their diets and eating more healthily.

This dose-response pattern is compatible with the hypothesis that suboptimal intake of some nutrients (mainly located in low adherence levels) may represent a risk factor for future depression.”

The research was published in the journal BMC Medicine (Sánchez-Villegas et al., 2015).

Gene for depression has a surprising upside.

The same gene that may cause depression in some, is linked to a better mood in others, a study finds.

This suggests that depression isn’t just ‘in your genes’: it is also about the environment.

The research challenges the idea that certain genes are risk factors for depression.

Instead, certain genes seem to make people more susceptible to life experiences.

Dr Chad Bousman, an expert on gene-environment interactions who led the study, said:

“Our results suggest some people have a genetic makeup that makes them more susceptible to negative environments, but if put in a supportive environment these same people are likely to thrive.”

The study followed 333 people over five years.

Their genes and levels of depression were tested.

They were also asked about any childhood sexual or physical abuse.

Almost one-quarter had a particular type of gene that has been linked to depression.

Those with the gene who had also suffered childhood abuse were much more likely to have severe depression in middle age.

Those with the gene, but without the abuse, were likely to be happier in middle age.

The gene — known as SERT — affects serotonin, a neurotransmitter which helps regulate mood.

Dr Bousman said:

“You can’t change your genotype or go back and change your childhood, but you can take steps to modify your current environment.

It also means that it’s not as clear-cut as telling a person that because they have a risk gene, they’re doomed.

This research is showing that’s not the case at all.

A person’s genes alone are not enough to determine how they might experience depression.

This research tells us that what may be considered a risk gene in one context, may actually be beneficial in another.

So this directly opposes the notion of genetic determinism, the idea that your genes define your fate.”

Related: 4 surprising benefits of depression.

The research was published in the British Journal of Psychiatry Open (Nguyen et al., 2015).