Written by Komalpreet Kaur
Mental and emotional health is just as important as physical health and well-being. It is crucial for you to be aware and accept your emotions, feelings and struggles. The everyday struggle to show up with
Written by Komalpreet Kaur
Mental and emotional health is just as important as physical health and well-being. It is crucial for you to be aware and accept your emotions, feelings and struggles. The everyday struggle to show up with a smile when you are not doing well is devastating and the pain behind that smile is unbearable. You don’t have to wear a mask and pretend to be happy when in reality your depression is choking the life out of you.
Let’s talk about depression and how it can make your world look grey and bleak.
Mayo Clinic defines depression as a mood disorder that causes a persistent feeling of sadness and loss of interest. It affects how an individual feels, thinks and behaves often leading to a variety of emotional and physical problems. Depression manifests in different forms and can be defined differently by people who have experienced depression or are still living with it each day.
To be diagnosed with clinical depression or major depressive disorder, the symptoms must be present for more than two weeks. You can also take the Beck Depression Inventory(BDI), a psychometric test to measure the characteristic attitudes and symptoms of depression.
The terms Smiling Depression, high functioning depression or perfectly hidden depression (PHD) are not recognized as conditions in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) because the symptoms of these conditions are atypical and in most circumstances, the person himself fails to recognize depression.
The smiling depression or perfectly hidden depression is dangerous because people with these conditions are capable of perfectly hiding their despair, hopelessness and pain. They live perfect lives for the outer world and never communicate their sadness to others and in worse case scenarios this sadness has a tight grip on the person, driving them to end their life.
Dr. Margret Rutherford Robinson describes in her book, perfectly hidden depression is a type of depression that may not fit the criteria or description for minor or major depression but is a depression that lays silently beneath the lifetime of acting as if everything is going perfectly well. The characteristics of perfectly hidden depression enable a person to hide or detach from emotional pain. Just because we cannot see the pain does not mean it’s not there and it is not affecting the individual.
- You are highly perfectio