Psychologist explains depression symptoms

Psychologist explains depression symptoms

hey guys it’s Dr Scott here if this is your first time visiting I’m a licensed clinical psychologist and the author of the book for when everything is burning today I’m going to talk to you about what a depressive episode feels like on the inside the first thing I want to explain is that there’s actually two different human experiences that we call depression and this causes a lot of confusion when people are communicating with one another depression is a normal human emotion that all people have felt and have experienced whether they have any kind of mood disorder or mental illness or not we also use the term depression to talk about major depressive disorder or any depressive episode that happens as a part of a mood disorder they feel a little bit similar but they are ultimately very different experiences what I’m going to be talking about today is a depressive episode which is something that only happens to people who have some type of mood disorder not everybody understands what a depressive episode is there’s two two differences between the general emotion of depression and a depressive episode the first is that the emotion of depression is caused by something external something has occurred in your life that has changed how you feel usually that’s going to be something like death in the family or a job loss or getting dumped or losing a relationship some type of loss typically produces these feelings of sadness or loneliness or hopelessness and they’re caused by something that has happened in our lives these acute experiences of depression will eventually get better on their own they do not require treatment necessarily although treatment can’t help chronic depression or depressive episodes are caused internally they can be triggered by external events but something happens inside of you that doesn’t happen for just everybody and it can be a little different from person to person what exactly that is but there’s changes in brain functioning that affect how a person feels and thinks and lives that’s a depressive episode not everybody understands that the second difference between depression the feeling and depression the diagnosis or the episode is that there are a cluster of other symptoms that go along with the depression that’s part of a mood disorder and that’s what we’re going to go into detail about today so a little side note here but I think that these two types of depression are why we get so much bad advice sometimes everybody has experienced the feeling of depression and everybody has overcome the feeling of depression when is that acute emotional state so if you have like a friend or a family member who had a period of depression when they lost their job let’s say and then they started working out and applied for more jobs and like read oneself help book and then they felt better because they were experiencing acute depression this person and I’m not trying to be mean this is probably a well-meaning person this person now believes I have experienced and conquered depression and so I know how to conquer depression and now if anyone else around me is feeling depression I will give them my blueprint for conquering depression and what they don’t realize is the depression they conquered was just an emotion and I don’t mean that in a minimizing way that’s still a really unpleasant feeling it’s not same it’s not even close to the same as depression the condition and the blueprint that people will offer you for what helped them with their acute depression is kind of like offering somebody with a broken arm of Tylenol you know it help a little bit it’s not going to solve the problem so that’s where I think a lot of this stuff comes from so there are nine symptoms of a depressive episode and to be experiencing an episode you’re Sid to have to be experiencing at least five of them the first symptom and the core symptom that must be present is depressed mood and that’s basically just that feeling it can be a little different from person to person some people describe depressed mood as a sadness or or a longing or a loneliness other people describe it more as an emptiness or a hollowness or a void so it isn’t necessarily exactly the same emotion from one person to the next the second symptom of a depressive episode is what’s called anhedonia the literal translation of the word anhedonia is loss of Joy this is a limitation or in some cases an inability to experience a lot of the positive or pleasurable amount emotions that we are normally capable of feeling your ability to feel excited about something that’s coming up in the future or to enjoy spending time with a person you love or to enjoy spending time on a hobby all of these emotions all of these responses inside are dependent upon your neurotransmitters or your brain chemicals to send signals or messages between neurons or brain cells when we’re experiencing a depressive episode are neurons abilities to communicate with one another are impaired and that results in difficulty transmitting emotional experiences so that’s also where that Hollow empty feeling can come from but when we’re experiencing anhedonia we can go out and do the things that we normally really enjoy we can have things planned that we normally get really excited about but it doesn’t really register emotionally sometimes it doesn’t register at all sometimes it just registers very briefly like things feel good but just not for as long as it seems like they should feel good for and this is why people who are in the midst of depressive episodes often stop doing many of these things they often isolate socially they often stop engaging in their Hobbies sometimes they stop doing things that make them feel proud or accomplished like doing their homework or going to their jobs or taking care of their hygiene or taking care of their home because all of these things depend on our ability to feel reward in order for us to want to do them and when that reward is minimal or absent we as reward-based mammals lose interest in doing these things so that’s anhedonia the next three symptoms we’re going to talk about are what are called the polarized symptoms of depression meaning these can push people to one of two extremes sometimes we tend to get the same extreme every time sometimes they bounce back and forth between them I know that might sound a little strange but it’ll make sense in a second so the first of the three polarized symptoms relates to sleep and people who are having a depressive episode tend to have their sleep impacted in one of two ways either we get insomnia meaning we have a lot of difficulty falling or staying asleep might take us one two even three hours to fall asleep and or when we do fall asleep we might wake up frequently and have a lot of difficulty going back to bed that’s insomnia we may also experience hypersomnia hypersomnia is when we suddenly start to need more sleep than we usually do you know the average person needs about eight hours of sleep if you’re experiencing hypersomnia you might need 10 11 even 12 hours of sleep in some cases you also might actually sleep more deeply than normal to where other people have remarked that it’s hard to wake you up or you sleep through alarms so the depth and length of your sleep cycles increase during an episode of hypersomnia some people experience sort of like a ping-pong effect where maybe they’ll have insomnia one night and get a net two or three hours of sleep and then sleep 11 hours the next night and just kind of bounce back and forth between these extremes which is really disruptive to your schedule and to your life functioning the second polarized symptom of depression relates to your appetite so sometimes when we’re depressed we pretty much lose all interest in eating and don’t really consume much food sometimes we experience the opposite and we feel like we cannot stop eating during a depressive episode and just like with sleep this one can also be kind of a back and forth where one day we’re one extreme the next day we’re The Other Extreme this relates to anhedonia again and so our ability to feel satisfied after we eat or enjoy our food isn’t just about physical satiety it isn’t just that we need food to live we consume food also for enjoyment food is a hobby food is fun food feels good or at least usually it does if you’re experiencing a depressive episode you may find that you no longer enjoy food and that is going to tend to push you in one of two ways either you stop eating or almost stop eating because there’s no longer any enjoyment associated with food or you eat much more than you normally would because after you eat the amount that you typically would you don’t feel satisfied because you didn’t enjoy the food and so your body and your brain one second what are you doing I’m trying to film a video about depression this mysterious business don’t you understand you don’t do that okay sorry about the interruption cupcake does not care that I am making a YouTube video right now so we sometimes can’t stop eating when we’re depressed because we didn’t enjoy the food the way we expected to and so that sends a signal to our bodies or rather from our bodies to our brains I should say that we must not have eaten enough because we do not feel satisfied after having eaten this meal the way we typically would or the way we expect it to and so sometimes that results in us over consuming food because we’re trying to chase this feeling that we’re not really capable of experiencing in that moment the third polarized symptom of depression relates to what’s called your psychomotor activity level psychomotor just means basically like brain and body connection and so uh psychomotor agitation is one extreme and this is when we get a lot of kind of purposeless or unhelpful nervous or even angry energy during a depressive episode people don’t always know about this one because you know the stereotype of depression is someone who’s who’s probably kind of like lethargic or not doing a lot or maybe not even able to get out of bed that’s not how it is for everybody some people experience this psychomotor agitation where they actually get like an uptick in energy during depression but because nothing really feels good to them they don’t necessarily have a great outlet for this energy and so you see a lot of restlessness like a lot of pacing a lot of fidgeting and having all this energy and not feeling like there’s anything you can do with it also tends to produce a lot of feelings of like irritability and anger short temperedness because it’s extremely frustrating to have all this built up in your body and know where to send it other people experience what’s called psychomotor retardation which is like less or slowing of energy and so this is when basically what this feels like is imagine that there’s a dial for the gravity of Earth and it’s normally set at 1.0 right this kind of feels like someone took that dial and put it on like 1.5 so even just the act of getting out of bed or getting up out of your chair feels like it takes more energy or more effort than it typically does for you everything is slower everything is harder Everything feels heavier your brain feels like there is fog in it or like there’s mud impairing your ability to complete a full thought so everything just becomes much more difficult to do the fifth symptom of depression is fatigue and it’s not hard to see where this fatigue might come from right if if your sleep is messed up if your nutrition is messed up if you’re not doing the things you normally would do in a day all of this is going to affect your physical functioning and therefore affect your energy level so when we’re in the midst of a depressive episode we often just feel like we have way less energy than we normally do and if you have less energy and less motivation you can see where that would lead to some of the functional patterns that we see when people are depressed which is that they tend to really struggle to do all of the things that they would normally do under better circumstances the sixth symptom of depressive episode is difficulties with focused concentration in memory brain activity which is how your brain does everything it’s actually how you do everything period even everything you do in your body originates in your brain your brain activity occurs when neurons or brain cells send signals to one another through chemicals called neurotransmitters the transmission or movement of neurotransmitters during a depressive episode is literally slower so your brain actually slows down when you’re depressed and this results in some of what we call cognitive impairments these symptoms sometimes can look a lot like inattentive type ADHD or add by the way that can actually be a tricky differential diagnosis in mental health but we get forgetful we have a hard time finishing our thoughts we walk into a room a room and can’t remember why we have a hard time sticking with a task for very long and it’s because our brain is not working as well as it normally would our functioning is impaired by the symptoms of the depressive episode so you often see a lot of add like patterns in people who are experiencing a depressive disorder or rather a depressive episode seventh symptom of depressive episode is unwarranted guilt and shame what this feels like is kind of like the reverse of narcissism if that makes sense so a narcissist is somebody who sees themselves as the source of everything good in the world right and they think anytime I walk into a room I brighten people’s day if I see somebody smile you know it’s because of me it’s because they got to meet me and talk to me today it’s this unrealistically positive self-appraisal right with depression we often experience the opposite of that in unrealistically negative self-appraisal so just flip everything I just sit around you feel like you bring down the energy or the happiness or the joy of every room you enter anyone you encounter who does not appear to be in a good mood you think to yourself that’s because they met me today I ruined their day by interacting with them because I’m so depressed I’m so miserable I’m so terrible to be around that everybody’s life just gets worse when I’m around this also tends to exacerbate or or worsen a lot of the patterns of isolation that we tend to experience during depressive episodes we stay away from other people because we’re trying to protect them from us we don’t want to infect them with our negative mood or our negative affect or our negative functioning it’s not real like I mean it can be hard to be around a depressed person there’s a kernel of truth to this um but you cannot like infect someone with your depression just so you know you cannot actually cause somebody to be depressed just by you being depressed it is not contagious so this is don’t fall victim to this you know what you really need when you’re depressed typically is to be around other people I may at some point in this video have lost count of which symptom I was on because this is the last symptom and I feel like I somehow was on number seven before but I have in fact said eight of them I went back and checked the last symptom of a depressive episode is suicidal ideation this actually describes a much wider range of symptoms and experiences than most people think experiencing suicidal ideation doesn’t literally mean like I am trying to end my own life it certainly can but that is not the only level of suicidal ideation and it’s in fact not in the most common level either we’re going to break down the concept of suicidal ideation into two categories passive and active and even Within These two categories there’s still a range passive suicidal ideation is what we call it when someone just sort of has mixed feelings about the fact that they exist and are alive when you’re experiencing passive suicidal ideation you are not seriously considering doing something to end your own life you just aren’t really thrilled about the fact that you’re alive and so you might have what’s called a passive Death Wish where it’s like you’re not going to do anything but if something happened to you to end your life you wouldn’t necessarily like try to escape it you’d maybe kind of accept it or be okay with it or at least have mixed feelings about it like you might go to bed and think you know if I don’t wake up tomorrow that’s fine it’s okay you might have thoughts just wondering like would the world be any different if I was gone would people really miss me would anybody care would anyone even be sad so it’s kind of these big picture philosophical pondering thoughts but there’s not gonna be an act Behind these types of thoughts so these are different than active suicidal ideation a person who is experiencing active suicidal ideation is on some level considering ending their life there are three components that we assess to determine what we need to do to help someone who’s experiencing active suicidal ideation the first is do they have a plan if you say like I want to end my life but you don’t have any particular plan to do it you’re probably not at imminent risk because almost all of the things that we can do most of them do take some amount of planning and preparation the second component that we assess is means in other words if this person has a plan do they have the ability to execute their plan in order to not be triggering I’m going to give a really ridiculous example here okay so let’s say that I have a plan for suicide and my plan is to Nuke myself to drop an atomic bomb on myself so I do have a plan then do I have the means to execute that plan it is very unlikely that I have the means to execute that plan most likely I am not in possession of a nuclear weapon I’m not by the way in which case I would be said to not have means the third component is intent in other words so if this person has plan and has means are they really considering doing this like pretty soon or are they even having to actively hold themselves back from doing it if a person has all three that is considered an imminent crisis situation and we’re going to want to try to get that person somewhere safe so a couple other points I want to make about depression and depressive episodes for someone to be experiencing a depressive episode they need to be experiencing at least five of the nine symptoms that we just reviewed for most days over a two week or longer period everybody has rough days every now and then sometimes there’s a reason for it sometimes there’s no reason for it sometimes we just wake up and we’re just not in the mood for life and if that’s like a day every now and then that does not necessarily mean that you have a depressive disorder if it’s happening for long periods of time it’s not really resolving on its own and it’s often happening for little or no reason that could suggest the presence of a mood disorder I also want to point out how different depression can look from one person to the next so in addition to the three polarized symptoms we talked about which can literally be complete opposites for people remember that you have to have five symptoms and there are nine of them so let’s say that you and I both experience depression and when you experience depression you experience depressed mood anhedonia insomnia decreased appetite psychomotor retardation and fatigue in other words you get kind of this shutdown I can’t really do anything type of depression let’s say that I get depressed mood hypersomnia increased appetite psychomotor agitation difficulty concentrating and suicidal ideation we look nothing alike like nothing our symptoms our experiences of depression do not even look like they are the same thing under our current diagnostic classification system but with you and me in that scenario would be considered to be experiencing a depressive episode so if you think that you might struggle with depression and you know someone who does struggle with depression and what they experience doesn’t really look anything like what you experience that doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t have depression because it can be dramatically different from one person to the next so those are the basics about the symptoms of depression and what it means to be experiencing a depressive episode how that differs from just the normal emotion of depression that everybody gets from time to time I am planning on doing quite a few more of these videos to break down other symptoms or other mental health diagnoses because we’ve done a lot of work on this recently but I still feel like even the most common mental health conditions like depression anxiety ADHD PTSD are not really well understood by the general population and we still see a lot of misconceptions and misunderstandings and stigma because of that so I’m going to be continuing to make videos like this if you got good value out of this I hope that you will consider subscribing to my channel if I’m not enough reason maybe my kids can convince you guys made us the comments

About 1 in 5 people will experience clinical depression at some point in their lives, yet the symptoms of depression are still not well understood by most people.

These symptoms include:
Depressed mood
Anhedonia
Insomnia or hypersomnia
Increased or decreased appetite
Psychomotor agitation or retardation
Fatigue
Difficulty with focus, concentration, and memory
Feelings of worthlessness or guilt
Passive or active suicidal ideation

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Disclaimer: This content is not intended to be a replacement for receiving treatment. It is purely educational in nature. My relationship with you is that of presenter and audience, not therapist and client. But I do care.