Surveys have found that more than half of people with depression have suicidal thoughts. However, most people who suffer from depression are “unaware of their illness”, and only 25% of patients are aware of it. The suicide rate of clinically depressed patients is 10%, and 20% of them eventually end up committing suicide. Despite the fact that many depressed people write suicide notes before committing suicide, they claim that death is a happy event. Yet the truth is that it is the severe depression that takes control of a person’s brain and tortures the mind that forces the patient to go to extremes and choose extreme death for relief.
So what are the clinical symptoms of depression?
1. The degree of depressed state of mind varies and can range from a mildly poor state of mind to sadness, pessimism, and despair. Patients feel heavy, life is meaningless, happy, depressed, spending days like years, painful, can not help themselves. Some patients may also experience anxiety, agitation, and nervousness.
2. Loss of interest is one of the common symptoms in depressed patients. The loss of enthusiasm and enjoyment of life and work in the past, and a lack of interest in everything. The patient does not experience the joy of family, does not care about past hobbies, often lives alone behind closed doors, alienates friends and relatives, and avoids socializing. The patient often complains of “no more feelings”, “emotional numbness”, “no more joy”.
3. Loss of energy, fatigue and weakness, difficulty in washing, dressing and other small tasks of life, and inability to cope. The patient often describes his or her condition as a “nervous breakdown” or a “deflated ball”.
4. Low self-esteem: Patients tend to overly devalue their own abilities and view their present, past, and future in a critical, negative, and denialist manner, describing themselves as worthless and having a dark future. Strong feelings of self-blame, guilt, uselessness, worthlessness, helplessness, and in severe cases, self-sin and suspicious thoughts.
5. Patients present with a significant, persistent, and generalized depressive state with difficulty concentrating, memory loss, mental retardation, thought closure, and slowness of action, but some patients present with restlessness, anxiety, nervousness, and agitation.
6. Negative pessimism: very painful, pessimistic, despairing, feeling that life is a burden and not worth staying, seeking relief by death, and may produce strong suicidal thoughts and behaviors.
7. Somatic or biological symptoms: Depressed patients often have biological symptoms such as loss of appetite, weight loss, sleep disturbances, low sexual function, and diurnal fluctuations in mood, which are common, but not present in every case.
8. Loss of appetite and weight loss: Most patients have symptoms of loss of appetite and poor appetite, delicious food is no longer tempting, patients do not want to eat or are tasteless, often accompanied by weight loss.
9. Hypogonadism: Early in the course of the disease, the libido may be reduced, men may become impotent, and women may experience a loss of sensuality.
10. Other: hallucinations, depersonalization, dissociation of reality, obsessive-compulsive and phobic symptoms can also occur during depressive episodes. Because of significant slowing of thought associations and memory loss, the cognitive function of elderly patients is easily affected and depressive pseudo-dementia occurs.