Depression is not something that just one day shows up. Usually it is something that one builds towards based upon the amount of adversity one deals with over time and how one approaches that adversity. It dos have many symptoms. Usually these symptoms are quite obvious if you know what to look for. Often times a person will just minimize symptoms as a passing phrase or a case of the blues. This tends to be particularly true for women. Unfortunately when these symptoms are ignored they become more difficult to escape without medical or professional help.

When one gets the blues it may seem easy to ignore. However this can just aggravate the situation more and lead one further down the depression path. If one does not get external help or snap out of depression on their own they could stay in a depression stage for years. They may even start to believe their conditions and feelings are normal. Without professional help one too often ignores the symptoms and merely glazes over their feelings or down playing them altogether.

This is true when we talk about the blues; in any case where depression is concerned, ignoring the symptoms simply aggravates the condition further. One people snap out of it without any external help; some people stay in the depression phase for years, for which they start believing such things are common and normal. Those who suffer from depression for a long time, without any help, develop their own defense mechanism against the pain and suffering, i.e. they learn to ignore and glaze over their feelings, underplaying them, putting them aside, or locking them in.

How does one come to have chronic depression? Overtime those who have lived with depression for any length of time develop their own mechanisms to avoid the pain. They find a way to store emotional baggage in the mind or to even completely accept it. These techniques may help one cope but they are actually harmful. It is far better to meet this problem head on, deal with it and beat depression.

When a person keeps their feelings to themselves and bottles up their emotions that person may become impervious to feelings altogether over time. This is not a healthy self defense mechanism. By keeping our heart free from pain one also finds it much more difficult to be happy. This conditioning one goes through against pain causes one to eventually forget happiness. When this happens one can be said to be suffering from chronic depression.

Chronic depression is a difficult position to be in. At this point normal depression symptoms are long gone. Because the person has become so accustomed to painful depression feelings that person now just accepts those feelings as normal. Chronic depression thus becomes very difficult to cure. It sometimes requires a wake up call. That too can be a very painful process.

If a person has arrived at the state of chronic depression it can be very difficult to return to a normal mode of living. It is possible so one should not give up, but they will need to make a very determined effort and have help from friends and family as well.