Pay attention if your friends and relatives pronounce them.
More than 250 million people worldwide suffer from the disease, according to a report by the World Economic Forum. Clinical depression is a serious illness that makes a person feel dull and empty almost all the time, shows no interest in anything, suffers from insomnia and loss of appetite.
Recognizing depression in a friend or relative is not as easy as it might seem. New research, published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science, reveals one way that can help recognize potential depression in a loved one: you need to pay attention to the words that he uses in everyday speech.
The researchers analyzed texts on 63 Internet forums with more than 64 thousand participants and found that people suffering from depression often use the so-called absolute expressions: “nothing”, “never”, “everyone” and “everything.” They have a black and white view of the world around them, which is manifested in the manner of speaking. Compared to 19 different control forums (such as Mumsnet and StudentRoom), there is twice as much absolute vocabulary in forums that discuss anxiety and depression. Even on the forums for those who feel they have coped with depression, there are many more words mentioned than on other sites.
Not surprisingly, depression sufferers use many negative adjectives and adverbs such as lonely, sad, sad, and unhappy. Interestingly, they use a lot more personal pronouns in the first person singular: “I”, “me”, “myself”, which may reflect how lonely they feel in this world. These pronouns, which indicate that people with depression are more self-centered and less connected to others, are more reliable in identifying illness than negative emotional words.
Research like this is especially valuable for parents of teenagers who are known to be reluctant to talk about their emotional well-being.
– These words do not always signal depression, maybe it’s just a person’s habit of repeating “nightmare” and “horror” all the time. Another thing says about depression: he doesn’t want anything. Even that which was pleasing before, no longer excites or causes minimal emotions – instead of shouts of delight, only a faint smile and then immediately withdraw into oneself. The first mistake of friends and relatives in this case is advice from the series to pull yourself together or to score on everything. Such phrasing is actually a lack of real empathy. It is best to be with them in this depressive state of theirs, to share their sorrow with them, to relieve them of loneliness, because this is the main cause of depression.