What makes people depressed?
There are two main sorts of depression, the sort that comes from outside and
the sort that comes from inside.
From outside:
- 'My parents are splitting up'
- 'My parents yell at each other all the time'
- 'My mum's depressed'
- 'I've been ill with flu for ages'
- 'My mum's very sick'
- 'I had a row with Mark last night. We're not friends anymore'
- 'I'll never finish this coursework'
The outside sort is when something horrible happens outside of yourself,
which makes life very difficult to cope with. Perhaps you fail your exams, or your
parents start getting divorced, or a friend commits suicide - dreadful things that
just make you want to curl up inside and cry for ever.
This kind of depression is painful, but medically speaking, also normal.
If you didn't feel pain, you wouldn't be human. Eventually, the biting
sadness wears off as you talk to people about your feelings, as nicer things
happen, as life just goes on. It's still there, like a scar, but it doesn't
hurt so.
From inside:
- 'I'm lonely - no one likes me'
- 'I just can't face the outside world'
- 'Nobody loves me'
- 'What's it all for anyway?'
- 'I feel tired all the time and I just don't feel like doing anything'
- 'I'm a loser anyway - why bother?
- 'My life is a mess. I can't make it work'
- 'Why am I so crap?'
- 'It's all my fault. Whatever I do, I hurt someone'
The second kind of depression is when something collapses inside yourself.
Gloom and greyness descend on your life for no obvious reason - everything else
might be fine, but you just can't see it that way. And if something slightly bad
does happen, it feels like a crushing weight. This kind of depression is
like an illness - like getting pneumonia or glandular fever.
No one really understands why we get these depressed moods that come up
from inside us. They are more difficult to cope with than the outside sort, and
they may also take longer to go away. That makes them very difficult to talk about
with other people. For a few people, the depression is so severe that it controls
every part of their life, and makes it seem as if it's not worth going on.
Talking is still the best thing to do, though. If you can say to someone you
trust, 'look, I don't know why, but I feel really, really down, and I need to
talk to someone', then that is the first step away from depression.
What are the signs of depression?
What helps depression?
If your friend is depressed.
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