December 2025

Depression

• Beyond a mood disorder
• It’s not just in your brain
• The Gut Brain Axis
• Herbal Support For Depression

If you have ever struggled with depression, you know that it is a whole-body experience. It affects how you feel, how you behave, and how you think about your body, yourself, and the world.

Depression – Beyond a mood disorder

What does it look like?

• Some will experience loss of appetite and weight loss, while others will gain weight.
• Some will find it hard to wake up in the morning, while others will toss and turn all night.
• Some will lose their libido, while others don’t.

The DSM provides a clear diagnostic criteria for depression. However, I choose to focus on the living experience of the person who struggles to carry the heavy cloud of depression in their daily lives.

Your body weighs you down.

Walking through life carrying the heavy weight of depression is tiring. Not the type of fatigue that comes with a long day of work or exercise that can be redeemed by rest, but an exhaustion that makes even the simplest task of getting up from bed or cooking a meal beyond one’s capacity.

When fatigue is so overwhelming, managing your energy output becomes a necessity. One of my clients once told me she had to choose between taking a shower and grocery shopping. She simply didn’t have the capacity to handle both on the same day.

What is pressing on your mind?

The sluggish experience of the body extends beyond the body into the realm of the mind and thoughts. Brain fog and memory loss are common in depression. Your brain feels like a large cotton ball, with no beginning, connection, or end to the thread of consciousness sliding through it.

What was once entertaining and fulfilling, like reading, writing, or watching a documentary, becomes unfathomable. You are left scrolling on your phone or changing channels on the TV, without stopping to watch and extract meaning from the content.

As I write this, I can’t help but stop to wonder about adults, young and old, who are addicted to scrolling on their phones. Could it be that doomscrolling is both a symptom of depression and one of the reasons we see an increase in depression rates?

Simple tasks that are usually automatic require your full attention, while complicated tasks that require planning and executing multiple steps exceed your capacity.

As humans, so much of our identity is tied to our ability to think, learn, and create. When these are lost, we lose part of ourselves, and with it, our self worth.

Emotional blunting

Most people associate depression with feelings of sadness; However, that is not true for all people with depression. I think specifically of one of my clients who came to me with fatigue, muscle pain, and insomnia. He didn’t mention grief or sadness, but when I suggested a care plan for depression, he saw improvement within weeks.

What is more common than feeling sad is feeling emotional bluntness, or flatness of emotions, which is the inability to feel or express both positive and negative emotions.

Detachment

Emotional bluntness is accompanied by detachment, a feeling of disconnect from one’s own body, others, and the world.

Detachment from one’s body may feel like the skin is too tight. It can become an issue when feelings of hunger and satiation don’t fully register. This explains why some people with depression tend to gain weight while others lose weight.

Feeling detached from other people and the world is isolating. People with depression consistently name isolation from others as a key feature of depression. They often feel unseen and misunderstood, leaving them feeling out of the tribe.

Dr Lucy Osler from the University of Copenhagen, writes:

“In depression, the feeling of being different from and misunderstood by others fixes a person in their first-person singular perspective, thus shutting off their ability to experience things as part of a ‘we.” Experiencing something as a “we” precisely involves experiencing something that could not be had apart and what is threatened is not only a sense of connectedness with others but an openness to being influenced and entangled with the experiences of others, of having the world unfold to us in new and exciting ways.”

Connecting the dots

For many people who experience these myriad symptoms, from the physical aches and pains to the mental fog and confusing forgetfulness to emotional bluntness and detachment, connecting the dots is hard.

The problem is exacerbated because the brain fog makes it hard to think clearly and get a holistic understanding that accounts for all the different symptoms.  

As a family member or a friend, it is important that we recognize the signs of depression beyond the screening tests so we can help the person who struggles with depression find the care they need.