How nice would it be if you could identify your mental illness just like you can identify your physical illness?  

Well you can! You just have to look closely. 

Let’s find out how you can know that you or anyone close to you has depression: 

Depression (Major Depressive Disorder) is a common and serious mental illness which causes extreme feelings of sadness and withdrawal from activities you used to enjoy and may affect how you think, how you feel, and how you behave. Many of the symptoms of depression might often feel common and normal, any of them in excessive amount is problematic and should be given attention 

The signs of depression can be seen through your thoughts, emotions, behavior and physical signs. 

First and foremost, depression causes the feeling of hopelessness, helplessness and worthlessness. This leads to arousal of distorted and/or negative thoughts like “I am not good enough” or “Life is not worth living”. If people have such negative thoughts towards life and themselves, and this thinking pattern lasts for a substantial amount of life, it might be a sign of depression. 

How we think directly impacts how you feel and vice-versa. Likewise, negative thoughts or distortive thoughts gives birth to feeling low or negative all the time. If a person keeps thinking they are not good enough, they will feel sad, unhappy, irritated, hopeless and under-confident.

Depression causes people to have these negative feelings of sadness, hopelessness, guilt, disappointment, loneliness and so on. You can identify the signs of depression by analyzing how someone is feeling and how long have they been feeling that way. 

Related Article: How to deal with depression

Your behavior is always influenced by how you think and feel. Negative thoughts and emotions leads to negative and distorted behavior. Some of these behaviors include withdrawing yourself from social interaction, drifting apart from close friends and family, losing interest from the things they enjoyed before, inability to concentrate, loss or increase in appetite and so on. 

If you look closely, you will be able to identify depressive symptoms in yourself as well as others. However, not all the signs mentioned above are prominent in all the people with depression.

If you are reading this, and you think you might have depression, go to a counselor or any mental health professional to know it for sure. Don’t self-diagnose. 

Most of all, if you identify depression in anyone, help them. Even if that anyone is you! 

Pratiksha Rajopadhyaya