Living in a chronic state of unhappiness or feeling depressed "for as long as you can remember" is not living, it is merely surviving.
Learn more about how we approach and treat depression at The Bridge to Recovery.
Depression is a leading cause of disability worldwide and is a significant contributor to the overall global burden of disease.
Depression often interferes with your ability to feel, think, and behave. It feels heavy and overwhelming. It is debilitating. It affects so many who begrudgingly try to fight through it.
It is time to stop merely surviving through life and thrive. Clients who attend our inpatient therapy for depression experience a renewed interest in life. Our Kentucky mental health center can help.
Like most of the other mental health conditions we discuss, depression can look unique to different individuals. What our residential depression center has provided here is simply a common, general list of known depression symptoms.
Depression can cause:
Depression often coincides with many other mental health struggles, and sometimes it stands alone. It can occur frequently, and sometimes it may occur only once during a lifetime. But, no matter how it looks, depression severely impacts our ability to function happily and healthily in life.
Depression very commonly develops due to trauma. When clients complete our residential workshop, they often report a significant reduction in depression symptoms, sometimes completely. Get in touch with our Kentucky trauma therapy program.
Living in a chronic state of unhappiness or feeling depressed "for as long as you can remember" is not living, it is merely surviving.
Like high-functioning anxiety, you will not find "High Functioning Depression" in any mental health diagnostic manual. However, we find it important to discuss it and characterize it here, as many folks self-identify with it.
It is not uncommon in our society (and, oftentimes, even romanticized) to hear such things as:
If you have caught yourself in any one of these patterns (or many others), you may also consider yourself having high-functioning depression.
Depression is vile. It can appear in many various forms and it can appear at many various times. One thing is for sure, however: living in a state of "functioning" is detrimental to our long-term emotional wellness.
Based on depression statistics, most of us can take a look at the Depression Spectrum and find ourselves somewhere along the way. Those in the middle will often identify as "functioning" because they can go to work, pay their bills, and care for their families. This is often at the detriment of their own emotional health as their social relationships, hobbies, and ability to participate in "non-essential" functions is hampered.
Individuals who identify as having functional depression may have received a diagnosis of Persistent Depressive Disorder, which is a diagnosable condition whereas functional depression is not. It is considered a diagnosis of "mild to moderate" depression.
The most significant characteristic with Persistent Depressive Disorder is that symptoms last more than a few years, making the depression chronic. However, many with this condition do find themselves able to maintain portions of their lives, such as caring for a family, paying bills, and even holding employment.
Symptoms of this condition, while certainly interfering with our emotional wellness, could be described as mild to moderate, making it possible to experience them without it being detrimental to our ability to function altogether – thus making us "functionally able" to live.
These can include:
Unless you find yourself on the “emotional wellness” end of the Depression Spectrum, underneath any severity of depression is unresolved pain. Whether living in a state of merely surviving or comfortably functioning, the long-term effects, when left unaddressed, will be detrimental.
A trauma is a loss, whether a real loss or a threatened one. We experience a loss when we are deprived of or have to go without something that we have had and valued – something that we needed, wanted, or expected.
When left unaddressed, grief festers, and we may experience it through a wide range of manifestations, including:
The experiential techniques used at The Bridge to Recovery are helpful in activating and facilitating grief work by addressing parts of ourselves that may remain hidden from our ordinary awareness.
For some people, feelings from trauma and loss can become debilitating and do not improve, even after significant amounts of time have passed. This is known as complicated grief. The inability to move forward from loss over time can impact an individual’s overall well-being and happiness, sometimes without them even knowing that grief is the culprit.
At our inpatient facility for depression, incorporating grief work into our process is key to helping our clients experience healing and emotional recovery. In doing so, participants can expect to work through their losses and grief in a number of ways.
Part of the work at our residential mental health care is identifying losses, identifying needs, understanding and moving through the stages of grief, and working on core issues.
Grief and loss are often so painful that we usually try to avoid the pain around it and find ourselves stuck in the healing process, moving further into complicated grief.
By attending our program, clients report they can finally and successfully identify, understand, and heal from their losses and grief, which in turn improves many other symptomatic behavior patterns.