Morning Glory

How does depression feel?

The symptoms of depression vary greatly from person to person, and men and women commonly experience it very differently. The official clinical diagnosis looks for the coexistence of things like significant changes, either up or down, in appetite and sleep patterns, feelings of inexplicable sadness or irritability, loss of energy, inability to concentrate, and inability to take pleasure in things you used to really enjoy. These are fairly vague descriptors, though. Some things that you may notice in everyday life are what you might be calling a lack of motivation--it may be tough to get out of bed in the morning, to face any social situation where you'll have to deal with people, to get yourself to start a project for school or work, or to get yourself to go out and exercise. You might start putting off things like paying bills or answering emails, and when you do get started, basic tasks seem to take forever. You might stop caring about your appearance, what you wear, or whether your surroundings are a mess.

A lot of people have been through this, and a lot of people have expressed what depression feels like far more eloquently than I ever could:

I wasn't steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn't get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado maust feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo. (Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar)
I felt a kind of numbness, an enervation, but more particularly an odd fragility--as if my body had actually become frail, hypersensitive and somehow disjointed and clumsy, lacking normal coordination. And soon I was in the throes of a pervasive hypochondria. Nothing felt quite right with my corporeal self; there were twitches and pains, sometimes intermittent, often seemingly constant, that seemed to presage all sorts of dire infirmities. (William Styron, Darkness Visible)
I can remember lying frozen in bed, crying because I was too frightened to take a shower and at the same time knowing showers are not scary....I knew that for years I had taken a shower every day. Hoping that someone else would open the bathroom door, I would, with all the force in my body, sit up; turn and put my feet on the floor; and then feel so incapacitated and frightened that I would roll over and lie face down. I would cry again, weeping because the fact that I could not do it seemed so idiotic to me. At other times, I have enjoyed skydiving: it is easier to climb along a strut toward the tip of a plane's wing against an eighty-mile-an-hour wind at five thousand feet than it was to get out of bed those days. (Andrew Solomon, "Anatomy of Melancholy," The New Yorker)
Mysteriously, and in ways that are totally remote from any normal experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain. But it is not an immediately identifiable pain, like that of a broken limb. It may be more accurate to say that despair, owing to some evil trick played upon the sick brain by the inhabiting psyche, comes to resemble the diabolical discomfort of being imprisoned in a fiercely overheated room. And because no breeze stirs this cauldron, because there is no escape from this smothering confinement, it is entirely natural that the individual begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion. (William Styron, Darkness Visible)

How common is depression?

That depends on the type of depressive illness.

Major depressive disorder (unipolar depression) strikes 5-12% of men and 10-20% of women; half of these people will have more than one episode, and 15% will commit suicide.
Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) affects 3-4% of the population, with a higher incidence rate at high latitudes, where there is very little sunlight during the winter. 15-20% of the U.S. population reports some symptoms, but for most they are not debilitating.
Bipolar disorder, or manic-depressive illness, is the least common form of depression, affecting about 1% of the population (which is still a lot of people). It is equally prevalent in men and women, and is strongly linked with artistic creativity. Artists, writers, composers, and musicians are ten times more likely than the general population to have manic depression.
Vincent van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, Albert Camus, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Leo Tolstoy, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Peter Tchaikovsky, Sergey Rachmaninoff, Dylan Thomas, Edgar Allan Poe, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Marilyn Monroe, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, Michael Hutchence of INXS, Tori Amos, Alan Turing, Ted Turner, Roseanne Arnold, James Taylor--all these and many, many more suffered from major depression or bipolar disorder.

What causes depression?

That is not clearly understood. In most cases, the first episode of a major depression can be linked to some life event--death of a spouse or loss of a job, for example. But recurrences are frequently not triggered by any specific event.

There is without question a strong genetic component in both bipolar and unipolar disorders. There is an 80% concordance rate among identical twins with manic depression. With major depression, the concordance rates are 70% for identical twins and 13% for fraternal twins.