Reactive depression: when external events hit us

A death, a separation, harassment, an intense family stress situation maintained over time?Reactive depression can come from a variety of causes This state, characterized by discouragement, despair and irritability, always begins in response to one or more external events that, at some point, will affect us.

What we all know is that it is not always easy to find the origin of a depressive state, psychological, environmental and personal factors usually form an extremely complex and very difficult set to unleash, however, it must be said that in many cases there is a very clear trigger. There is a cause of stress that the patient does not know how to handle, resulting in a series of psychological processes that exhaust and invalidate.

  • Reactive depression appears to be a response to a negative event in a person’s life.
  • Being more common in women than in men and almost always originates from a family event.

Reactive or situational depression is the most common mood disorder in a clinical setting, somehow knowing this condition can help us to be aware of a very important aspect, it is likely that we will all experience this type of personal reality.

In addition to its physiological causes, there is another psychosocial area that is not always under our control, because life, as Vicente Aleixandre once said in one of his poems, is difficult, so difficult that it is not enough to row hard to move forward. . Sometimes we’re stuck.

It is an obvious fact that most of us have seen it many times, when life hits us in one of its forms (whether aggression, loss of work, betrayal in a relationship, etc. ), not all of us suffer the same effects There are those who, for any reason, have better resources, greater psychological flexibility, a stronger and more experienced resilient heart.

Others, in turn, are hit as if they had been hit by a heavy object on the car’s windshield. Chances are this surface won’t break the first time, but the glass will crack, and even more dangerous: what will be called residual stress will remain.

Sooner or later, this windshield will eventually break with a new impact. The same goes for a lot of people. After an adverse or problematic event, some people may take weeks to begin showing the clinical picture of reactive depression.

We have said this several times on our website; No psychological disorder has specific symptoms in each patient, in addition, we often have very heterogeneous and complex clinical conditions, so when it comes to reactive depression, there is another fact: it has a very strong link with the patient’s personality. , some distinctive dimensions of this condition are generally highlighted:

We have several studies with which we increasingly understand the anatomy of this type of depression, for example neuropsychiaters like Jin Mizushima explain that personality factors and other conditions should not be overlooked, let’s look at some of them.

As we said at the beginning, reactive depression is one of the most common disorders in the population, especially among women, however, despite its incidence, that is to say that, of all types of depression, it is the one that has the best prognosis. In general, it is essential to seek professional help, as cognitive behavioral therapy is more effective in these cases.

In conclusion, we simply want to say that the vast majority of people end up reacting very quickly to treatment once the underlying problem is solved and when the right tools are also used to overcome the disease, we cannot think twice before asking for help and preventing these painful moments from becoming chronic over time.

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