Five SignsĀ Someone's Depressed
Five Signs Of Depression
Hi, Neil Shearing here from Epicentering.
Today I'd like to share with you five signs that someone's depressed.
I think it's really important to go over these because often the person who's depressed will not notice these symptoms within themselves.
It's hard to explain, but depression can come on so slowly and gradually that initially you don't know that there's a problem and by the time there is a problem you've lost the cognitive ability to figure out what's going on.
It's really important that other people are aware of the signs of depression and can help the person that's starting to struggle.
An Inability To Cope With The World
Okay, so I think the first sign is the most important one and that is "an inability to cope with the world".
So if a person's suffering from depression they will be in a situation that they think they can't cope with and they will probably think it's their fault.
So internally they will be beating themselves up for not being stronger, braver, able to do more work, able to take on more stuff, able to cope and this is kind of like the apex of the pyramid.
Everything flows from this an inability to cope with the world.
Someone who's struggling may use words like "burnout", "stress", "stuck". They're struggling to deal with the circumstances that they're in.
They're struggling to cope with their world as they see it.
I think that's probably the most important sign and it can appear in a raft of different ways. but the underlying message is that they're struggling to cope with the world.
There are two ways that this inability to cope with the world can be alleviated:
1: Reinforcing the person's ability to cope with the world.
The positive phrasing I use often is...
"Life only comes at you one day at a time. If one day at a time is too much, one hour at a time or one minute at a time.. you can get through each minute just breathing and allowing yourself to focus just on the here and now"
2: If possible try to change the experience that they're having.
If they feel like they're doing way too much at work, have a conversation with their boss. Say that they need to take some time off or reduce their workload, or have other people step forward to take some of the weight off of the depressed person's shoulders.
So either changing the world itself (what's going on in that person's world) or changing how they feel about their ability to cope with the world, and preferably both.
Here I've listed a few of the things that the depressed person will probably be doing if they feel they're unable to cope with the world, and how it may be seen by people around the person who's experiencing depression.
A: The person who's depressed will appear frustrated, irritable and angry at the world.
It's very important if you're around someone who's depressed that you try not to take it personally. The person who's depressed is frustrated at the world, they will not discriminate if they're having a really bad time as to what's causing it. They're not having a go at you, they're not frustrated at you, they're frustrated at the world and their inability to cope with it, and they're probably locked in a cycle of self-blame, so they will appear frustrated, angry and irritable with the world
B: The person who's depressed will try to escape from the world.
My choice of things to do to escape from the world was to play video games. It was a safe and controlled environment where I felt that nothing was going to go wrong for those moments that I was in the video game. It was very simplistic, it was very "on rails" and it was quite calming. Other people will have other ways of escaping from the world and these are the usual vices such as comfort eating, watching television, gambling, shopping... all the different things that people do for a boost. People with depression will often latch on to one of these experiences as a way of escaping from the world and they may do them to extremes. That is often like the first sign, if something like drug addiction, alcohol, smoking, things like that, gets out of hand that can be what people present with, but the depression is the underlying cause because the person's trying to escape from the world.
C: The person who's depressed will try withdraw from the world.
They will not be interested, generally, in doing social activities or hobbies or anything that previously they engaged with the world and did and enjoyed. Those things will be turned off and will not give the depressed person the same enjoyment or pleasure that they used to have.
In summary, the depressed person is often frustrated or angry with the world, escaping from the world and withdrawing from the world, all because of an inability to cope with the world as it is.
Persistent Negativity
Okay, so the second thing on the list is "persistent negativity". The depressed person will change and they will likely not recognise that they've changed.
They may become cynical, envious, jealous. They may have slowed thoughts, slowed speech, slowed actions. They may have a lack of imagination, of curiosity, of spirit, a lack of drive, motivation and personality.
It would be very hard to be around the person as this depression progresses but if you can catch the earliest symptoms then that's the best time to catch and treat depression but over time the person will become progressively more cynical, envious, jealous and lacking things.
A huge part of depression is the person will appear to be lacking things: lacking enjoyment, lacking motivation, lacking curiosity, lacking imagination.
All these things are being lost to the person and the problem is that, inside their head they don't recognise that they've lost these things!
It's a cognitive impairment. The ability to be self-aware and to recognise who you are is progressively lost so the idea of curiosity is lost, the idea of imagination is lost.
It's very difficult for the depressed person to see from within the change that's happening, but it might be more obvious to the people on the outside and at that point it's important to try to get the person help for depression.
Control
The next sign is "control". If a person who's never been particularly controlling in the past suddenly starts becoming controlling or not necessarily suddenly, but over time becomes more controlling, that's a sign of depression.
There's a huge desire in someone who's suffering from depression to keepĀ everything the same because they don't have the ability (or they feel like they don't have the ability) to cope with the world as it is.
They feel like, "please don't change anything". If anything changes, it becomes more difficult to cope with because suddenly it's not how it was. It's become more complicated. Not only are there all these variables that the person's struggling to cope with, but you've changed one.
"Don't change anything". It sounds so controlling, but it's vital because that person is like scrabbling on the edge of a cliff, fearful they're going to go over. It's taking all their energy, all their effort, to stay exactly where they are, scrabbling on the edge of a cliff.
And then, if anything happens, like a puff of wind, that's it, that's just gonna send them over the edge. The merest hint of a puff of wind would be terrifying. Or even someone appearing below and starting to shout, you know, they might be shouting something helpful, but if you're in that moment, where you're scrabbling on the edge of the cliff and you think you're going over, you don't want any extra variables.
So yeah, everything must stay the same. Change is seen as destabilizing, stressful, and resisted, but everything staying the same means actually doing nothing or very little. So if you look at it from the outside, the person like myself playing video games, they look like they're doing nothing, but that's because they are 100% focused on avoiding the world because it's too much to cope with.
So they pare back and pare back and pare back, but things get worse and worse and worse. So everything has to stay the same. We'll try and take variables away, you know, to alleviate the stress. "No, I won't do this, I won't do that, I can't do this, I can't do that, not today".
We're trying to take things off the plate to cope with what's going on. And so this element of control is just trying to make things stay the same.
If that's only objects and things, then while it's not ideal, it's not impacting others. But if other people are involved, the depressed person may be perceived as trying to control other people, like "just do this the same time every day", or "do that the same time every day". "Stick to a routine. Things can't be changed". But then that other person feels very put-upon and controlled, so that can really impact relationships, but the person who's depressed isn't doing it for kicks or for fun or for enjoyment, they're doing it because they desperately can't cope with what's going on, and while they try to figure it out, (and that's not happening), things must not change, so that's where that comes from.
Loss Of Emotions
It might be strikingly obvious that the depressed person is experiencing no pleasure, no fun, no joy, no laughter, no love, no happiness, no relaxation, no contentment and no peace.
This is a more traditional sign of depression. It's not so much about sadness and crying, (although that can happen because that's a way to release some tension and frustration), but I would imagine more common is this "anhedonia", which means "no pleasure". This, again, makes the person exceptionally difficult to be around.
Depressed people are generally divorced from these positive feelings. They will experience "negative" feelings like a sense of "worthlessness", "overwhelming disappointment" and "powerlessness", but they won't want to experience those feelings. So those are shut off and as those are shut off then the positive emotions are shut off too.
That's where theĀ descriptions of "numbness" and "lifelessness" come from. The person is completely shut off from their feelings. They're experiencing a loss of emotions, a loss of feelings.
Rejection Of Everything
As I was talking about earlier, the depressed person is struggling to cope with life.
They want everything to stay the same and so they reject any other variables that come near them. And that will look like they don't want to be around people, they don't want to go anywhere and they don't want to interact with the world.
It's a case of, "I can't cope with what's going on, therefore I want everything simplified. And don't change anything while I'm trying to simplify it to reach a level that I can cope with".
Unfortunately as progression develops, that way of dealing with the world doesn't work, the depression gets worse, the person shrinks, the depression gets worse, the person shrinks, so it's kind of a self-propagating thing that gets worse and worse and worse but what it will look like from the outside is the person rejecting everything.
Again, it's quite important if you're around the depressed person that you try not to take it personally. They're not rejecting you personally, they're rejecting everything.
They don't want to be around people although they're desperate for help.
They don't know how to ask for help because they can't figure out the problem!
To ask for help you've got to say, "help me with this problem". But if you can't figure out the problem then you can't go up to someone and say, "help me with life", so there's a rejection of everything. A rejection of people, a rejection of going anywhere.
Why would you go anywhere if it added to an already overflowing plate? There's so many decisions to be made around going somewhere...
who's gonna drive
what time are we leaving
have we got to pack stuff
It's just overwhelming and so they don't want generally to go anywhere or do anything because it's adding to the plate and the plate's already overspilling.
They don't want to interact because that's difficult. Again, it's part of this cognitive problem that it requires decision-making.
Decision-making becomes impossible, just impossible!
But everything involves decisions so it's part of this cognitive decline, "impairment" if you like, which goes hand in hand with the emotional impairment as well.
If you're not going to get pleasure from these things why do them? It's just gonna add more to your plate. "Well there's no way I'm doing that then"!
Conclusions
I hope these five signs of depression give you food for thought whether you're just starting to suspect that you may have depression and you're starting to use words like "stuck", "stressed" and "unable to cope" and things like that then please get help because it's much easier to come out of depression at the early stages than it is after it's gone on a long time and got worse.
Perhaps you recognize the signs in someone close to you, or you're looking for the signs in other people.
These will be some of the signs.
I remember way back when someone asked me whether I thought I was depressed (when I was depressed) and I thought it just meant being upset all day crying all day.
I wasn't doing that, but I was doing a lot of these things!
In the early stages of depression people can be good at masking these signs so if you just say to someone, "how are you doing?" and they reply, "I'm fine", that's masking if they're not fine but they don't want to trouble other people with what's really going on.
To see these signs in the early stages, it's important to really observe people because they may not be aware themselves. They may be busy masking and some people are very, very good at masking some people less so, but it can happen in the early stages because there's a real fear around not being able to identify a problem that you think you've got.
Like I say, how can you ask for help with a problem you don't know you've got? I remember going to my doctor and saying I think I've had a breakdown! I still didn't have a clue that what I had was major depression for an awfully long time.
So yes, if you notice these signs when they're obvious then the person will probably be depressed. If they're not obvious then it's important to try to be observant, especially if the person is masking. Catching depression early is very important.
Okay, I hope you found these five signs of depression useful. Please share this video or bookmark it, save it, tell other people about it on whatever platform you see it and follow, subscribe and like for more in the future.
Thank you very much.
