Depression is a term that we all use in an everyday sense. Something mildly or fairly upsetting happens to us, and we get “the blues” for a while, followed by recovery. This is not what occurs in a major depression. One issue is chronicity—for a major depression to be occurring, the symptoms have to have persisted for at least two weeks. The other is severity—this is a vastly crippling disorder that leads people to attempt suicide; its victims may lose their jobs, family, and all social contact because they cannot force themselves to get out of bed, or refuse to go to a psychiatrist because
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