Where does depression come from? Why is it classified as a disease?
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It’s that clinical depression isn’t just sadness. There are many clinical features that you could break down into three parts; somatic, mood and cognitive
Mood seems obvious, and it must mean feeling sad/depressed, but sometimes it’s just feeling nothing, being flat. Not getting enjoyment from things you did enjoy. But also worthlessness and hopelessness (hopelessness is a really worrying thing and is a big thing when assessing risk of suicide)
Somatic symptoms are the physical types things; lack of appetite, weight loss of gain (might have bouts of eating excessively and high calorie stuff so potentially get weight gain), lack of energy, sleep disturbances of various kinds
You then get to cognitive. This can be loss of interest in thing you enjoy (compared to wanting to do something but then not getting enjoyment from it), lack of concentration. Slowing of thoughts. Obsessive thoughts connected with the depression. At its most severe you can get depressive delusions and hallucinations. These would be fitting with the depression mood, so things like believing you are dead or seeing yourself rotting when you look in the mirror (extreme examples or an extreme symptom but you get the idea).
When you add all these factors together you can see the difference between feeling sad and an illness
But you then look at causes. Most people with depression will probably be a multi factorial reason. So likely has some genetic/biological susceptibility and then gets trigger but a bad event and it doesn’t really resolve when that event happens, or something along those lines.You then have people who life is shit, everything is going wrong, and you can see why they would be depressed, it’s probably a normal reaction. There are some people where is origin seems to be entirely or largely biological. There are no obvious triggers, no reason for mood to drop.
I hope by me explaining it extensively can show why the term depression can be used for something thought of as a disease. Hope it helps
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