If you are asked to picture someone with mental illness, how would you imagine the same?
Someone having trouble speaking with people? Someone having sleepless nights or someone sleeping all day long... someone looking helpless and feeling worthless all the time or maybe most of the time? Death wishes?
Or will you for a minute imagine a happy, successful, well educated professional living a grand lifestyle with the perfect blend of exciting job package and lots of friends?
But someone who wakes up with a restless, anxious mind and forces himself to continue being as perfect as yesterday, holding it all together and pretending to just normal.
Or will you picture someone you admire for all his entrepreneurial skills at his recent startup, making millions every year.
But silently is the most obsessed self-criticising and unsatisfied person. Someone for whom achievement is easier than enjoying each day. Someone who smokes 30 cigarettes a day, to get through a masked face.
Or would you extend your imagination to a very happy, extrovert, competent colleague who is the highest rated employee of the company but secretly feels hollow, unhappy and drowning all the time.
(Trust me, I have met each one of them)
The truth is you will probably not think of any of these people. Yet each one of them could be someone struggling with the most common kind of mental illness called DEPRESSION.
While this kind of depression doesn't seem to come under the category of stigma, the diagnosis can have high risk if left untreated. The tricky part of this kind of depression is that its difficult to spot because people who struggle with it looks way to perfect to find a flaw. The perfection is so strong that the individual dealing with it also loses the ability/thought to identify as being clinically depressed.And it is a BIG PROBLEM.
Clinically, this kind of depression is termed as DYSTHEMIA. According to DSM 5, Dysthymia is a mental disorder characterised by depressed mood most of the time for more days than not, as indicated by either subjective account or observation by others for at least two years.
Though these symptoms look similar to major depressive disorder, people dealing with it might experience at a different intensity but if left untreated it could turn into MDD.
So these people are still able to to go office, chill out with their friends, work efficiently, be involved in romantic relationships and looked as someone not depressed. But invardly, they can be the same people struggling invisibly.
Dysthymia requires proper intervention like other mental illness. And the best part is that with support and medical treatment (however suggested) it can be both managed and treated.
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