What is the depressive disorder ?

Depressive disorder is a state of low mood and aversion to activity.  A depressed person is having feelings of sadness, helplessness and hopelessness. Feeling "depressed" is often similar to feeling "sad", but both clinical depressive disorder and non-clinical depressive disorder can also refer to a conglomeration of more than one feeling.

What are the symptoms of the depressive disorder ?

• Psychological or physiological wear out and loss of vitality

• Feelings of guilt, hopelessness, anxiety, dread, or weakness

• Reduced amount of involvement or joy in all, or almost all, daily activities mostly every day

• Altering appetite and detectable weight loss or gain

• Psychomotor agitation or deceleration almost daily

• Feelings of overwhelming sadness or fear or the apparent inability to experience emotion

• Trouble focusing or making decisions or a generalized retardation and obtunding of cognition including memory

• Unbalanced sleeping patterns such as excessive sleep or hypersomia, insomnia, or deprivation of paradoxical sleep

• Continual thoughts of death, not just fear of dying, haunting suicide ideation with precise plan, or a particular plan of committing suicide or suicide attempt.

  Additional clinical depression symptoms occasionally accounted for but not typically taken into account in diagnosis include:

• Lack of attention to personal hygiene

• Concern of “becoming mad”

• Diminishing self-esteem

• Alteration in perception of time

• Sensitivity to noise

• Physiological pains and achings with the impression that they may constitute signs of grave sickness

The depressive has pervasive and uninterrupted depressive thoughts and conducts. They manifest themselves in every area of life and never pass away . The patient is gloomy, dejected, pessimistic, overly serious, lacks a sense of humor, cheerless, joyless, and constantly unhappy. This dark mood is not influenced by changing circumstances.

His self-image is distorted: he appreciates himself to be un-needed, incapable, a failure. His sense of self-worth and his dignity are invariably and unrealistically low. This borders on self-disgust and self-denial. The Depressive corrects himself unnecessarily. His interior dialog (occasionally spoken) is derogatory towards himself, blaming and self-critical. Freud called this inner judge the Superego. The Depressive's Superego is sadistic, grim, relentless, self-denigrating, and, ultimate hatefully suicidal. Dimly aware of this semi-suicidal streak, Depressives are by nature anxious and inclined towards excessive worrying and pondering.

The Depressive extends this leaning to humiliate and punish to his closest and beloved. His masochism is complemented by equally exigent sadism. He's negativistic, passive-aggressive, discriminative, faultfinding, and correctional towards other people. Such repeated outbursts are accompanied by feelings of remorse and guilt, frequently coupled with maudlin and flat apologies.

It seems that the Depressive fails to shift perspectives, focusing almost always on the "what is", never even giving a chance to "what could be". He is lost in the past, wandering thru a forest of self-failures with the Superego as his only companion. Trying to cope with his failures, the depressive often chooses to view the dark side of those around him, judging and blalming like there`s no tomorrow, continuing to fail to see the beauty in the world, thus feeding his inner saddness further. If the depressive were only to remember a simple truth: 

THE WORLD AROUND YOU ACTS 
AS A MIRROR OF THE INNER YOU

(can even be explained by quantum physics nowadays).

So if the "what you see around you" makes you feel this way, why not change perspective? Choose to see something else. Looping in a bad enviroment won`t result in changing it to a better enviroment, on the contrary, you will continue to spiral down making things even worse for yourself. So stop right there! Let`s make a short perspective shift right now!

1. Stop whatever you are doing (it might be a cause for your low mood) and focus all your energy and thoughts on the most enjoyable moment/event/activity of your life! And i do mean FOCUS. Let nothing/nobody break this focus. Try to make this into a habit: whenever you`re down, engage into the activity that makes YOU the POSITIVE YOU (be it remembering something funny, playing a computer game, enjoying an icecream or whatnot). Do it regularly until you make a habit out of just feeling good.

2. Fight it! If there trully is a problem, there trully is a solution to it! I know it can be hard to do while being depressive and nothing ever feels worthwhile doing, but you are the only one who can pull yourself out of the negative loop you entered. Find your problem, see it`s source (it`s root) and let it go. Be at peace with it and let it go.

3. Now get dressed and go for a walk! That`s right, turn off the computer and go for a walk. A few things to remember tho': try to look around you while you walk (always looking down at the asphalt won`t do much good to your internal state). This walk is intended to make you face the world, and you don`t want to face it with your head down, show a little dignity, god damn it! Also try using a different route you haven`t used before (so you won`t eventually fall prey to your boredom enemy), maybe you`ll see new things, maybe a new perspective is just waiting for you around the corner.

4. Be good. Be the change you want to see in the world and that change will be reflected back to you. It trully is a no-brainer that you have been constantly feeding your depression by acting depressed and seeing only via the eyes of the depressive. That is why this step is so important. You will need to pay constant attention to your inner state and slowly change your depressive ways towards the non-depressive ways.