You Lose All Interest In The Outside World

Your sense of isolation from friends and family may cause you to feel alone. Long before that, the spouse knows and needs to love enough to confront the reality of the disease. You have now increased the likelihood of your spouse’s deciding to seek treatment. As for the spouse who is seeking to be an agent of positive change, the pain of observing an addicted mate often seems overwhelming. In this case, tough true love is the most powerful weapon for good. He could now see the fruit of his hard work beginning to pay off, yet sitting in my office, John was not a happy man. Chapman, I’ve worked hard. I’ve been under a lot of stress for the last three years. Some people told me that the business would not make it, but I was determined. The business is on solid ground, and I am certain that it will grow over the next few years. She seems so unhappy and sad almost all of the time. I don’t remember the last time I saw her smile.

Forcing Yourself To Be Happy

She is so negative and pessimistic about everything. She has been prophesying the demise of the business for the last year and a half. She spends most mornings in bed, and in the afternoons she just sits around the house. She seems to have no ambition. She does get the children a snack when they come home from school, and she talks with them a bit about their day. But every night, I have to bring food home for dinner. She says that she doesn’t have the energy to cook. Many nights, she doesn’t eat with us. She must have lost forty pounds over the last year. This, of course, makes it hard for me to sleep. She worries about everything. To be truthful, life is pretty miserable at our house.

Defying Gravity

I feel sorry for the kids, although they get more attention than I do. But I know that they must wonder what is wrong with their mother. With that brief description, John had just described the common symptoms of depression. For the depressed person, the mood will be sad, the thinking negative, and the behavior lifeless. These characteristics are often accompanied by general anxiety. The person will express fears, uncertainty, and indecisiveness. Thousands of men and women can identify with John’s frustration because they too live with a depressed spouse. Unfortunately, many of them have little understanding of the causes and cures of depression. They simply do not understand why their spouses cannot snap out of it and get on with life. Lack of understanding often stimulates frustration and a critical spirit. A spouse’s critical words actually compound the problem. There are many types of depression, each with its own specific cause and each producing varying levels of depressed feelings and energy.

All Things Must Pass

It is helpful to think of three categories of depression. You want to lie still and sleep as much as possible. You lose all interest in the outside world. It is nature’s way of protecting you from constant anxiety about what you are missing in the real world. Fortunately, the influenza passes and your depressive mood lifts, although you may have noted that it tends to hang on for a day or two after your physical symptoms are gone. It often takes the mind a couple of days to get back to its normal state. A second kind of depression is often called situational depression or reactive depression. This type of depression grows out of a particularly painful situation in life. Most of these experiences involve a sense of loss. For example, depression often follows the loss of a spouse by death or divorce, the loss of a job, the loss of a child to college, the loss of parents to death, the loss of a friendship, the loss of money, the loss of health. Depression may also arise over the loss of a dream, such as a happy, fulfilling marriage, the loss of the love feelings that you once had for your spouse, or the loss of hope that your marriage will ever be as fulfilling as you once hoped. A third category of depression is rooted in some biochemical disorder, which has put the mind and emotions in a state of disequilibrium. Sometimes this is referred to as endogenous depression. This depression is physical disease. There are various forms of biological depression. Some are related directly to the brain where something goes wrong with the electrical and neurochemical transmissions. Others are related to disorders of the endocrine system. Lowered or heightened levels of these hormones can produce depression. Also, certain disorders of metabolism can produce depression. The body is constantly assimilating food, breaking it into substances that can be stored and used as energy. When things go wrong in the metabolic system, depression can sometimes result. For example, abnormally low blood sugar levels can produce feelings of emotional instability and depression. There may well be biological reasons why females are more prone to depression than males. The female reproductive organs are known to create mood swings. The variation in estrogen levels markedly influences the mood of women. The good news about biologically caused depression is that it is readily treated with medication. The far more common depression is situational depression. Medications are of little or no value in treating situational depression unless, of course, the situational depression has gone on for a long period of time and has affected the biochemistry of the body. It is true that extended periods of depression, whatever the original cause, may lead to problems in the neurochemical transmission system in the brain. Thus, medication may be a part of a treatment program. Nearly all of us, from time to time, experience brief bouts of situational depression. These are simply our normal responses to the problems of everyday life. At other times, however, depression becomes a serious problem. The term often used of these more serious periods of depression is clinical depression.