Varsha, a 32-year-old housewife, feels low all the time. She shows no interest in household chores and watches TV most of the time. Sometimes she forgets to eat her meals too. She takes no pleasure in smiling at her young daughter’s antics, or has the desire for intimate relations with her husband.

Payal, a teenager in the final year of college, is “moody” according to her friends. She gets extremely tensed when exams approach and fears she will fail. There are days when she is irritable, when she snaps at everyone, and cries for no reason.

In his early thirties, Suresh has recently taken on a senior managerial role. With his increasing workload he wishes his bosses and co-workers were more understanding. On some days he fakes illness just so he doesn’t need to face the world.

All of these people feel low, sad and have mood swings. But do mood swings and sadness denote depression?

What is clinical depression?
The word “depression”, unfortunately, has been attached to any emotional state that involves the person withdrawing from the world and feeling down. Yet, there is a vast difference between clinical depression and sadness. Among the three cases above, Varsha would be the person of interest to a medical expert who would diagnose her symptoms as clinical depression.

As Dr Parul Tank says, “Mental health experts are trained to recognize the symptoms of depression but it has become such a common word that everyone complains of it”.

Studies show that depression underlies majority of suicides, or attempts for suicide, is the eighth leading cause of death, and is the third leading cause of death among people aged between15-24.

Learning to differentiate when sadness moves into a full blown mood disorder is crucial to the treatment. But equally important is the necessity to recognize that certain blues and low moods pass in time and do not warrant medical intervention at all.