Holiday versus Clinical Depression

Series Summary

Depression is an extremely common psychiatric disorder which manifests itself through several symptoms, including loss of interest in usual activities, persistent decreased or depressed mood, and sometimes thoughts of suicide. Clinical depression affects between 7 and 18 percent of the population at some point in their lives before the age of 40, and one episode of depression is likely to lead to more depressive episodes in the future. While there are several causes for depression, some of the most common causes for depression include genetic predisposition, medical conditions, sleep quality, or psychological factors such as a death in the family, or poor self esteem.

Video Transcript

"Hi! My name is Rachel Blackston and I am here on behalf of Expert Village and I am a private practice mental health counselor in Orlando, Florida and I work at a private practice called Twelve Steps in Ovieda, Florida. I am here to talk about how to deal with depression over the holidays. The first distinction that I want to make is that there is a difference between clinical depression and sort of a case of the holiday blues. If you think that you may be clinically depressed, it is very important that you contact your medical doctor, a psychiatrist or a professional counselor. In the case of clinical depression, it is so important to understand that it is a very complex issue. There are many different aspects of depression. If you think that you might be clinically depressed, there is a questionnaire that is available at depression.com that you can take that would be an assessment and would be available to you. Depression can be defined as a feeling of sadness, pessimistic view of life. It is something that you can't just quickly snap out of it. There is a biological aspect of depression. For example, there can be an imbalance in the brain so there is an aspect of the brain chemistry. There is also a psychological aspect of depression so there may be a way for a person to deal with unresolved emotions in their life such as anger, sadness, if you have a child that lost a parent, a significant caregiver as a small child and never had room to grieve, that could show up as depression. And finally, there is circumstantial depression. There is job loss, environmental stressors in life such as a divorce and all of these things can send someone into a period of time where they are having very pessimistic thoughts, a very melancholy mood and I will talk later about some of the symptoms of depression, so it is not something you can snap out of with pure will power. So it is really important that the people understand the complexity of depression itself."