Welcome back. This is savvy psychologist. I'm Dr. Ellen Hendrickson and I'll help you meet life's challenges with evidence-based research, a sympathetic ear, and zero judgment.

This week, let's talk about depression, which is like a salad, so hear me out on this one. Because salads come in a staggering variety, right?

A leafy green house salad, a creamy macaroni salad, even a jello salad. These are all salads. So how do you group together such disparate examples?

Well, two things. First, a salad is a variety of foods. You can't have one ingredient

and call it a salad. And second, a salad is bound

together with a common dressing. And so it is with depression, with nine different Hallmark

symptoms of which you need five or more for an official diagnosis,

there are hundreds of possible combinations. But across those combinations are some commonalities.

Think of these as the dressing that pulls a salad together.

No matter what constellation of depression symptoms you have, it probably includes three things.

According to a study of almost 1,200 depressed individuals in the super-p prestigious

journal Nature Medicine, 97% of people with depression struggle with their mood, feeling

chronically unhappy, hopeless, or helpless.

A tad more than 96% have what's called andhedonia, which is when pleasure and satisfaction

get crushed like a cigarette butt under a stiletto heel.

And 94% feel wiped out, call it tired, fatigued, or exhausted.

Whatever you call it, it's feeling about as energetic as a sloth in

slowmo. But after those three, there is a huge range of symptoms and hundreds of

possible profiles, the equivalent of Ambrosia versus Taboulli.

And to make things more complicated, some of the symptoms are opposites.

So for example, losing your appetite or eating everything that's not nailed down are both symptoms, as is feeling agitated and restless, feeling like you've been fitted with some cement shoes, or worse, both.

No matter the combination, depression is serious.

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