Symptoms of 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 major 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 hypersomnia, 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 through 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 blaming like there`s no tomorrow, continuing to fail to see the beauty in the world, thus feeding his inner sadness further.