Are you depressed? Or is it just grief?

Making this distinction between grief and depression has long been a concern of perceptive observers of human nature. In my book Grief’s Wisdom (2000) are more than 1,200 quotes from ancient to modern times that explore grieving. In what he considered his most important contribution, the observation of emotions in humans and animals, Charles Darwin saw distinct differences in various species, some of which were able to grieve and form new attachments and others that were not. Sigmund Freud, in his later writings, found the differences between mourning and melancholia, the parallel terms for grief and depression, to be an essential distinction to make. He noted that in depression, it was the self that felt lost or worthless, while in grief it was the world that seemed empty.

Grief is a normal, healthy, healing, and ultimately transforming response to a significant life change that usually does not require professional help, although it does require finding ways to heal the broken strands of life and to affirm existing ones. Grief can be the start of being fully alive!

Depression, on the other hand, represents a stress-filled state of unrelenting disconnection that can be the result of a circumstantial, biological, psychological, or spiritual imbalance that makes it impossible to function fully after a loss. You begin to just exist, alive until death itself provides the release.

The word “grieving” suggests that it is possible to know why we feel low, for grief is tangible, the direct result of the loss aspect of any change. When we are grieving, we know there is a connection – we are struggling with how to recognize its extent and limits, embrace its significance, remember it and restore its meaning. To call what we are feeling “grief” powerfully validates, makes real, our losses, our grief, and our potential to transform it.

When we grieve, we become aware of just how deeply we feel connected and how profound our sense of loss is when those connections are disrupted. Honoring the fullness of our loss permits us to realize that we can’t make it on our own, and we thus discover the delicate, essential threads of meaning and love, what I call “gossamer threads,” that still weave themselves through our lives.

Depression, conversely, implies disconnection: when what was once tangible is gone, nothing is left. When we feel depressed, it is because we cannot or resist finding reasons or connections that would “fit” with what we feel. In fact, depression often disappears when we find such a connection. Depression is something to survive, to cope with, or to defend against, but it is not a condition in which we can learn new methods of coping or transform old ones. Depression is frequently vague and fuzzy, and so are our problems and the way to health, wholeness, and reconnection.

In short, when we are grieving, we can consider both despair and hope, though perhaps not at the same moment. In depression, hope neither exists nor is sought. Consequently, while grieving responds to the love and support that a healing community can provide, depression usually requires professional help to contain, limit, or alter its potentially devastating impact. Only on limited occasions (perhaps thirty percent of the time) does grieving get so complicated that it requires grief counseling or other forms of professional support.