Depression is a malady that builds up over a given period of time. It does not strike at once, but gradually adds up to depression. There a number of symptoms that will tell you that someone is suffering from depression. These symptoms are loud and clear, provided you know how to look for them. Women, in particular, tend to ignore the symptoms as passing phases, or blues, out of which people do climb out without any outside medical or other intervention.
This is true when we talk about the blues; but where depression is concerned, ignoring the symptoms simply aggravates the condition further. Some people snap out of it without any external help; some people stay in the depression phase for years, for which they start believing such things are common and normal. Those who suffer from depression for a long time, without any help, develop their own defense mechanism against the pain and suffering, i.e. they learn to ignore and glaze over their feelings, underplaying them, putting them aside, or locking them in.
How Do You Get Chronic Depression?
People who learn to live with depression for years develop certain safety measures which ensure the pain stops. These safety measures are usually techniques which enable the mind to either store the emotional baggage or totally ignore it. Either way, it is harmful to the person. What you need to do is meet the problem head on and solve it as and when it happens.
The bottling up of feelings and force-controlling of emotions over a long period of time makes the person impervious to feelings altogether. There is a peculiarity in our self-defense system. If we lock the door of our heart to pain, we somehow manage to keep happiness out as well. This is how the conditioning against pain in the long run makes one forget happiness altogether. This is when the person will be suffering from chronic depression.
When chronic depression sets in, the symptoms of depression have long gone. The person by now has dealt for so long with painful feelings caused by depression, that these feelings have become part of his/her psyche. The chronic depression is very difficult to cure because, once it settles in, in order to break its veneer off, it is needed to "wake" up the person to his/her real feelings, which is again a very painful process.
Once chronic depression has set in, it will take a superhuman effort to put the person back into a "normal" mode of living. It is possible, but it is very tricky to achieve it.
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