Poll of the Day > People confuse depression with emotion

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You have all sorts of emotions happy sad mad yes depression is a thing dont turn it into a disease cause its not but arv its a chemical imbalance in the brain that 100 percent of people have lets not turn depression into a fad yes arv gets depressed when his dog dies or when a game gets canceled but in the end its just an emotion
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In a parallel universe, your sentence hasnt stopped yet
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The problem is that we use the words depression/depressed to refer to two different things psychologically.

In some cases, "I'm depressed" is absolutely a reference to emotions, and is effectively saying "I am kind of sad and lethargic because of reasons". In other cases, someone referring to depression is absolutely talking about chemical imbalance and a psychological state which you can't just "cheer up!" your way out of, that exists as a prolonged state of being and which often needs to be medicated to achieve normalcy. But people confuse the two terms, and either become dismissive of the very real medical condition, or conversely, overinflate their own problems by self-diagnosing themselves with a condition when really they're just sad about stuff.

Much like with the global warming/climate change debate, people using conflicting terminology to mean different things muddies the water and kind of ruins the entire discussion. What we actually need are better operational definitions to firmly differentiate between the two things, and allow the general public to develop a greater awareness of actual facts.


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Tl;dr
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ArvTheGreat posted...

Tl;dr

Tl;Dr he expanded on your idea. Arv did good.

Depression, anxiety and so on are natural emotions. The problem is when you're in that state of mind constantly. Folk are quick to dismiss and trivialise mental issues that they can't see though. It bugs me when even professionals lump anxiety with depression though. These are two different things. My mind is far too wired to feel depressed.
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