Mental Water Torture - Mild to Moderate Depression

There is a silent killer amongst us. With little fanfare it ruins lives and even ends them. At any given time, some three percent of the population is under its spell, mostly women (by a ratio of two to three to one). The experts call it dysthymia. We know it as mild to moderate depression.

If we think of major depression as a spectacular brain crash, milder depression can be compared to a form of mind-wearing water torture. Day in and day out it grinds us down, robbing us of our will to succeed in life, to interact with others, and to enjoy the things that others take for granted. The gloom that is generated in our tortured brains spills outward into the space that surrounds us and warns away all those who might otherwise be our friends and associates and loved ones. All too frequently we find ourselves alone, shunned by the world around us and lacking the strength to make our presence felt.

The symptoms are similar to major depression, with feelings of despair and hopelessness, and low self-esteem, often accompanied by chronic fatigue. This can go on for years, day in, day out.

Still, we are able to function, a sort of death-in-life existence that gets us out into the world and to work and the duties of staying alive then back to our homes and the blessed relief of flopping into our unmade beds.

All too often, we are told to snap out of it. That the invisible water torture we carry in our heads is our own fault. And shamed into thinking something is wrong with our attitudes, we fail to seek help. Or, if we do, it's our family physician who confuses a very real chemical imbalance in the brain with some imaginary defect in our personality. And so we are sent away with a stupid happy pill such as a tranquilizer (whose depressive effect only adds to our quiet misery).

Some of us turn to the bottle or illegal drugs. Others seek a more permanent solution. Yes, even milder forms of depression can be lethal (experts estimate anywhere from 3 to 12 percent of dysthymics cure themselves by suicide).

And, sooner or later, it happens, the brain crash. Major depression. That's how most of us wind up, according to the experts, sometimes with a double depression, a depression on top of a depression that never had to be. One that could have been stopped years before.

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