Clinical depression often has as many physical symptoms as mental. These are caused by the feelings or emotions that are the symptoms of depression.
Do any of the following sound familiar to you?
You feel:
• miserable and sad;
• exhausted a lot of the time and have no energy;
• like a failure and/or feel guilty a lot of the time;
• very anxious sometimes;
• a burden to others;
• irritable or angry more than usual;
• you have no confidence
• that life is unfair;
• that life has/is ‘passing you by; and
• even the smallest tasks are often impossible.
• You don’t enjoy things like you used to. This could be sex or food. Alternatively you might ‘comfort eat’ to excess.
• You don’t want to see people or are scared to be left alone. Social activity may feel hard or impossible.
• Thinking clearly is difficult.
• You sometimes feel that life isn’t worth living.
• You can see no future. There is a loss of hope. You feel all you’ve ever done is make mistakes and that’s all that you ever will do.
• You spend a lot of time thinking about what has gone wrong, what will go wrong.
• You are very self-critical. You may also feel guilty sometimes about being critical of others.
• You have difficulty sleeping or wake up very early in the morning and can’t sleep again. You seem to dream all night long and sometimes have disturbing dreams.
• You may have physical aches and pains which appear to have no physical cause, such as back pain.