ALL SADNESS IS NOT DEPRESSION

PSYCHOLOGY PAPER

ALL SADNESS IS NOT DEPRESSION

Ms. Manisha Hardy

September 16, 2023

Author Note

Manisha is a Psychologist cum Counselor and an independent researcher in the field of Clinical Psychology and Applied Counseling.

This article is to make people aware about the mental illness and how they can identify symptoms of depression and differentiate it from sadness.

Introduction

Sadness is an intense emotion in persons’ life experiences. It is typically characterised by a plethora of feelings like disappointment, loss and failure. Sadness or grief is sometimes described as psychological pain that is accompanied by feeling of loneliness and is characterised by specific behaviour patterns like social withdrawal, slow performance, changes in sleep, fatigue and feeling of worthless or guilt. Some researchers have characterised sadness especially in humans as a constructed emotion (Barrett, 2017) arising from domain- general system of brain, once information from the body and external environment has been contextualised by representations of prior experience. Sadness is a normally experienced emotion that every single person feels in life at soe point. It could be temporary phase or if it persists for a longer period, two weeks or more than it might take the form of depression. All around the globe, millions of people experience sadness or grief at least once in a lifetime. Feeling sad is an integral part of depression but the intensity matters. Reasons for grief or sadness differ from person to person  and culture to culture.