Depression Treatment Center in Knoxville, Tennessee and Fort Lauderdale, Florida

It’s important to understand that depression doesn’t just mean being sad. Most people conflate the term, so if you tell someone close to you, like friends or family, that you are depressed, they might tell you just to get over it or to be happy. But in fact, you can be depressed without being sad. Sadness is just one part of depression, and knowing when to get help for depression and addiction entails knowing what real depression disorder looks like.

Depression

Real depression, sometimes called major depressive disorder or clinical depression, brings with it:

• Constant feelings of emptiness, sadness, or anxiety
• Feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, worthlessness, or guilt
• The loss of interest in activities or hobbies that you once enjoyed
• Fatigue or complete lack of energy
• Difficulty concentrating, making decisions, and problems with memory
• Sleep problems including insomnia, oversleeping, or waking too early in the morning
• Appetite changes or weight loss
• Digestive problems, cramps, headaches, or other pain without any clear physical cause, especially paying that doesn’t go away with pain management
• Thoughts of suicide 

Depression can be caused by many things. For some people, it’s genetic. If you have a family history of depression, you might actually have specific genes in your body that cause depression. If this is the case, you can only get legitimate help with things like medication and therapy.

For other people, depression is brought about by significant life events. Something like trauma can trigger serious PTSD, which leads to major depressive disorder that might seem controlled and may not affect you on a daily basis, but as soon as you get flashbacks or triggers, it can quickly spiral out of control, leaving you feeling hopeless, with no energy, unable to sleep, and potentially suicidal.

Similarly, there are many people who suffered from childhood trauma, excessive poverty, or abuse, which led to the onset of depressive disorder later in life. Without using the proper therapies to uncover these causes and address the untreated trauma, your depression might get worse with time. 

What’s most important to understand is that depression looks different in each person. Your struggle is personal and unique, so your treatment should be just as personal and unique.

Addiction

Depression and addiction have a tumultuous relationship. For some people who have a pre-existing clinical depressive disorder, feelings of social isolation, hopelessness, and other symptoms can cause people to self-medicate with drugs and alcohol. This creates many problems, including dependents and the worsening of symptoms. 

For example, certain drugs like opioids or alcohol can make depression symptoms worse. So someone who drinks to ease their feelings of hopelessness might end up feeling even more hopeless and potentially suicidal.

As someone continues to self-medicate, especially for undiagnosed depression, it changes the way the brain chemistry works, which cannot only worsen depression symptoms but lead to the development of other mental health problems like anxiety. Continuing drug and alcohol abuse produces tolerance, and the more you are tolerant of drugs or alcohol, the more you have to consume to get the same feelings of ease. All of this leads to a vicious cycle of dependents and depression.

Worse, still is the fact that certain drugs like cocaine can actually cause you to develop depression. Even if you didn’t suffer from depression before, drug abuse can change your brain chemistry and lead to a chemical imbalance in your brain that creates major depressive disorder.