Psychological, Physical And Social Symptoms Of Depression

The common misconception with depression is that sufferers will be feeling a general sadness and low mood, but there are many feelings and emotions that people will experience when suffering with depression and everybody's journey will be different. These feelings can be psychological, physical and social or even a mix of all three.

Psychological symptoms

One of the difficulties with depression is not being able to pinpoint a specific feeling or explain to others exactly how you are feeling or the mix of emotions that are flooding your system. The case study in the learning guide, P's story, shows how the emotions make them feel completely hopeless, life became a struggle and everything became to much to cope with.

You will need to summon up the strength to get out bed in the morning to start each day when all you want to do is hide away under the covers, a lack of appetite, often caused by a constant nausea, can lead to weight loss, this in turn leads to lethargy and fatigue. From this tiredness irritability is easily formed, feeling irritable with yourself for the things you can’t do and irritable with others for not understanding, for being noisy when going about their lives and even for them trying to help you. All of these feeling build your levels of anxiety and feeling of distress.

Guilt can add weight to your worries, when feeling unable to work when you know that you should be supporting your family, depression makes it difficult to communicate with others and concentrating and decision making becomes almost impossible.

All of these combined psychological symptoms and emotions can become over bearing and in the most severe cases feeling of hurting yourself and suicide can become over whelming.

Physical symptoms

Depression will also affect your body in many physical ways. As discussed above tiredness and lethargy can play a big part in how you are feeling. When the body and mind is constantly tired your body movements can become slower and feel harder work. This can lead to aches and pains, but often they can be unexplained, parts of the body that have always been healthy and strong that can hurt for no reason. The unexplained pains can lead to further anxiety when you do not know why you hurt or you start to worry that there is something seriously wrong with your health. Speech can also become slower and more difficult, finding the right words can sometimes prove frustrating.

Weight can be effected by either loss or gain, some sufferers will be unable to eat others may turn to food as a source of comfort. Depression is known for effecting the workings of the digestive system, symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome can flair causing pain, bloating and constipation or diarrhea. Sexual relationships and drive can be effected in both men and women suffering with depression, a lack of positive feelings about yourself can lead to low self-esteem, not wanting to feel close to somebody or let somebody close to you.

Social symptoms

With all of the psychological and physical symptoms effecting the mind and body, social situations and events can become difficult to deal with.

Work is often one of the first things to suffer, it’s not easy to uphold performance levels and keep a cheery disposition with colleagues. Personal relationships are probably one of the worst hit of our social scene, when feeling depressed and anxious we tend to push away or attack those closest to us.

As we lose interest in social functions and our hobbies and activities, we avoid contact with friends, preferring to spend time alone.