Depression - do you have it?

A New Year has now started, and we may be experiencing a range of emotions. Feeling any emotion is a natural part of life. We cannot be happy all the time, but how do we know if our sadness is Depression?

A good place to start is to google ‘Black Dog Institute -Depression test’ and this test will screen for symptoms of Depression and then give you recommendations of what will be beneficial for you.

Dr David Burns, says this well in his book ‘Feeling Good’ (2009) “Sadness is a normal emotion created by realistic perceptions that describe a negative event, involving loss or disappointed in an undistorted way.

Depression is an illness that always results from thoughts that are distorted in some way”. Some distorted thoughts are I am hopeless, I am worthless, I am a failure - these can be challenged.