This is self-work and I'm Dr. Margaret Rutherford.

At self-work we'll discuss psychological and emotional issues common in today's world and what to do about them.

I'm Dr. Margaret, and self-work is a podcast dedicated to you,

taking just a few minutes today for self-work. Hi, I'm Dr. Margaret, welcome to my fourth podcast. Today we're going to be talking about

perfectly hidden depression again. I talked about it for the first time on

podcast three. We identify the characteristics of perfectly hidden depression.

There was a questionnaire you could take to see if you actually could identify with it yourself.

In this podcast, however, we're going to talk about what you can do about it.

So first, we'll briefly define perfectly hidden depression once more.

We're going to go through the characteristics again very briefly.

And the third thing we're going to do is talk about six major steps in actually

confronting or coping with perfectly hidden depression. The last thing we'll do

we'll hear from a reader who wrote me an email saying that his wife definitely suffers with perfectly hidden depression and he doesn't know what to do to support her.

So I gave him some ideas and I'll share them with you.

So the first thing we need to talk about is what is perfectly hidden depression.

It's not a diagnosis. You're not going to find it anywhere in any diagnostic manual.

It's a term I coined about two and a half years ago when I sat down

to write a weekly post and was thinking about some of the people I'd been working with through

the years that had such significant trouble engaging

with their more painful emotions. Sadness, shame, fear, disappointment, anger.

They really struggled to engage with those feelings, to express them to me, and

they would actually sort of smile when they were talking about things that were maybe

...