Depression, differences from hypothymia, stages and treatment

Features of emotional disorders

Every person experiences a whole range of different emotions every day. Depending on temperament, character and habits, some feelings manifest themselves brighter, others more muted. This is normal and natural.

Disturbances in the emotional sphere are spoken of in cases where the emotions experienced by a person are inadequate in strength of manifestation (too strong or weak), frequency of occurrence, inappropriate for the environment (laughter at a funeral) or situation (violent reaction to a minor stimulus). Also, such pathologies are characterized by manifestations of emotions that are abnormal and unusual for a particular individual. For example, the appearance of emotional lability in a calm, reserved person. What is emotional lability? These are sudden mood swings, jumps in the emotional background.

Hyperthymia is characterized by increased emotional excitability, unreasonable and inadequate joy, and euphoria. Hypotymia, on the contrary, is characterized by chronic low mood.

Any emotional disorder can be an independent deviation from the norm, a symptom of another mental disorder, or a consequence of prolonged frustration (i.e., the inability to get what you want).

Recommendations

• Practice meditation to learn how to achieve peace and tranquility. Your nervous system needs to be calm at least sometimes. Otherwise, there is a high risk of developing any mental disorders. Most often, phobias arise, which bring a lot of difficulties and troubles into everyday life. And insomnia due to strong emotions is also extremely dangerous to health.
• Try to avoid communicating with authoritarian, dictatorial people. Considering your impressionability and vulnerability, such contacts will not be beneficial at all.
• Learn to stop yourself in situations where you feel like you are losing control of yourself. Or rather, over your emotions. Use the breathing techniques outlined in this article to calm yourself. And when anxiety, restlessness, or even excessive joy arise, inhale and exhale on a count. And when you stabilize your condition, then make decisions so as not to make mistakes due to impulsiveness.

Hypotymia. What it is?

Hypotymia is an affective disorder characterized by chronically low mood, apathy, melancholy, reduced motor activity and lack of motivation for activity, indifference to external and internal stimuli.

Physiological symptoms (so-called vital melancholy) are also noted: a feeling of heaviness and constriction in the heart area, in the chest or throughout the body, discomfort, a feeling of tightness.

With this disorder, depression and melancholy come to the fore. If anger and aggressiveness are added to these two signs, then a diagnosis of dysphoria is made.

When the symptoms are minimally expressed, they speak of dysthymia (so-called neurotic depression). It often occurs in people who live under stress for a long time or who have experienced an unexpected serious shock. With dysthymia, mood gradually worsens throughout the day.

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The ultimate manifestation of hypothymia is depression. Hypotymia and depression themselves are not life-threatening diseases. However, the apotheosis of this state is melancholic frenzy, which leads to an obsessive desire to injure oneself and suicidal thoughts.

If you observe constant apathy for 2 weeks, you should definitely consult a doctor.

Melancholic stage

Unlike mild depression, the symptoms of which were described above, the melancholic type of disorder is a danger to a person’s life. At this stage, suicidal thoughts appear.

Patients, describing their condition, talk about unbearable sensations that are impossible to live with. This is the same feeling of melancholy as in the previous stages, but it is expressed to a much greater extent. The feeling of unmotivated anxiety also worsens and becomes even more painful.

Sometimes patients claim that their feelings have disappeared. Their subjective perception is not so subjective; melancholy excludes a normal emotional response.

Very often in the melancholic stage one can find a complaint about the lack of any aspirations. Patients have a very difficult time with the disappearance of desires, which is uncharacteristic of the human psyche. The symptoms that depressed patients are well aware of and can describe, at this stage already occupy almost all of their thoughts.

A person with a melancholic type of depression often has a very characteristic appearance. This is called a mournful pose; depression changes the patient’s appearance, behavior, and movements. This mournful pose is well known to everyone: drooping shoulders, tightness, hunched posture. Specific wrinkles may appear on the face, which arise as a result of the fact that the patient constantly has a sad expression on his face.

In the stage of melancholy, somatic (bodily) disorders are clearly visible:

• pale and dry skin;

• accelerated pulse;

• constipation;

• shallow breathing;

• hair loss;

loss of appetite, weight loss (as a result of which women's menstrual cycle may be disrupted).

Hypothymic personality type

A previously changeable and labile person always becomes gloomy and depressed.

Positive emotions in this state are usually superficial, very weakly expressed, quickly exhausted, or completely absent.

Hypothyms see only negative aspects in any event. They perceive the world in gray and black tones and do not expect anything good from life. Such individuals are prone to self-flagellation and self-deprecation over the most insignificant reasons. Hypothyms blame themselves for absolutely everything; they inflate the slightest trouble to unimaginable proportions.

Such people have low self-esteem. Hypotims are always waiting for tricks and troubles. This forces them to play it safe, do their work with special care, and attach a lot of importance to the little things. Such tactics allow hypothymic individuals to become very responsible workers, but they never show initiative or apply innovative work methods. They try to avoid everyone's attention.

Since hypothymic people have a hard time experiencing any smallest troubles, they may not be able to cope with real grief. In such situations, it is very important that loved ones surround the hypothym with care, support and understanding.

Causes of hypothymia

The most common causes of hypothymia are:

• Intoxication;
• Traumatic brain injuries;
• Somatic diseases;
• Family problems;
• Unrequited love, strong emotional experiences;
• Low academic performance, devaluation of successes and achievements by people around them;
• Diffidence;
• Stress;
• Difficult life situations;
• Sleep disturbance.

Mood disturbances can be a symptom of certain mental illnesses: depressive syndrome, chronic schizophrenia, cyclothymia. A depressed state appears during withdrawal symptoms in drug addicts.

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Other types of depression

Everything said above referred to simple depression (this is the name of the nosology, not a characteristic). But there are other variants of depressive syndrome:

Postpartum depression occurs up to four weeks after birth. The reason for the development of this depression is ambiguous and includes many factors: hormonal, emotional, mental, etc. At the onset of the disease, the clinical picture of postpartum depression is quite simple - it is a loss of interest in life. However, then the mother associates these changes with the birth of the child. Before giving birth, the woman was happy, but after giving birth she suffers from insomnia, an unusual diet, and insufficient sexual activity, which changes her attitude towards her child. At the same time, the woman feels useless, unnecessary, since she associates the birth of a child only with negative sensations.

Masked depression is never perceived by the patient as depression. The patient suffers from any somatic disease, be it hypertension or diabetes. If laboratory tests demonstrate normal values, the patient is more likely to doubt the doctor’s professionalism than his own illness. Depression wears various clinical masks, and only a specialist can determine the real cause of the disease. Until this moment, the patient can be treated for years for a variety of diseases. The so-called Protopopov triad is considered a classic: mydriasis, arrhythmia and constipation. These three symptoms almost always appear, regardless of the nature of the mask.

Anesthetic depression is a complete loss of senses. Anesthesia is a loss of sensitivity, and much the same thing happens with depression. The reaction of a patient with anesthetic depression to any event will always be sluggish, aloof, and weak. A situation that would previously have brought tears to the patient, against the background of depression, will be experienced detachedly, as if the incident does not concern him at all. Patients often say that they live out of habit, but do not see the point in it.

Vital depression is a mild form of depression in which the disorders are unstable. The course of the disease is wave-like: the depressive period begins for no apparent reason and manifests itself with all the classic signs of depression.

Apathetic depression is characterized by a deep violation of the volitional sphere. The patient loses the incentive to act, feels a loss of desires and aspirations. Over time, detachment develops, which greatly complicates the patient’s social life.

Diagnostic methods

Correct planning of treatment measures and treatment results will depend on the correct diagnosis.

Hypotymia is most often diagnosed based on a verbal interview with the person or based on the results of the following tests:

1. Spielberg-Khanin test, which determines the level of personal and situational anxiety;
2. Apathy level self-assessment scale;
3. Geriatric depression scale, consisting of 15 questions (used for working with older people).

These tests can also identify emotional instability.

Relationships with other psychotypes

Excited individuals most often have problems interacting with society. It’s especially hard for those close to you. If someone in the family has a similar temperament, then life with such a person is like being located next to a dormant volcano. It is impossible to predict what emotional impact a particular situation will have on an exalted family member.

Society mostly tries to avoid such people, hence:

• frequent conflict situations occur;
• a person with such an emphasis at work is not given important tasks, usually he does not occupy high positions and it is difficult for him to move up the career ladder;

• A person with such a temperament usually does not have close friends either due to mistrust, because it is difficult to trust a person with such an explosive and unpredictable emotional background.

Most often, these individuals, leaving the care of their parents and other relatives, cannot cope with life’s tasks, even with everyday problems, so some of these people simply become drunkards or even find themselves without a roof over their heads. Usually these psychotypes are lonely. Among famous actors and other creative personalities there are many examples with a similar fate. Many of them, despite their talent and popularity, died poor and lonely.

Some exalted personality types may consider their behavior completely natural and normal throughout their lives.

But if you understand and realize the problem in time, then with the help of certain techniques you can curb your character to some extent, stabilizing the emotional background.

Treatment

Treatment of such accentuation is based on the correction of an enhanced character trait that prevents a person from interacting in society. You cannot completely change your temperament, but you can get rid of negative manifestations. For this, there are special techniques for working on yourself. This is what psychologists do. The course of treatment depends on the severity of the accentuation and can last three months or even years.

A person’s behavior and his reactions to various events in life depend on the type of nervous system (temperament) and the most striking personality traits (accentuations). The existence of sanguine people, choleric people, phlegmatic people and melancholic people has been known to the scientific community since ancient times. But the theory of accentuations is relatively young. The first works in this direction were published in Europe in the 70s of the twentieth century, and in Russia the names of the authors of the famous questionnaire, Leonhard and Shmishek, became known only in 1983. As a result of diagnosis based on a new approach, a person can be classified into one of 10 types of accentuations, each of which is characterized by specific reactions to types of stress of different types and intensity. These include the exalted type, which is clearly expressed in approximately 15% of the world's population.

At what age does exaltation cease to be the norm?

There is nothing bad or dangerous in exaltation itself. At a certain age, this behavior is normal. Preschoolers aged 3-5 years are characterized by uncontrollable laughter, intense gesticulation, and strong distress over reasons that are insignificant for adults. It is to this period that affective-exalted reactions belong, when a child laughs or cries so much that he cannot stop himself, literally choking on emotions. As the emotional-volitional sphere develops, the child learns to manage his emotions and correlate their intensity with the strength of the stimulus.

The next stage, when accentuations of the exalted type again clearly manifest themselves, is adolescence. Against the background of a hormonal explosion and puberty, a growing child cannot cope with emotions, laughs and cries for no apparent reason, and cannot always cope with himself. And again, as hormones return to normal and the nervous system matures, the teenager’s exaltation fades away.

If the nervous system is characterized by increased excitability, the social environment or other conditions prevented the strengthening of the nervous system and the emotional-volitional sphere, teenage exaltation is sometimes observed in adults. The state of emotional instability returns at any age among lovers and young parents. Exaltation often becomes an integral part of the life of people in creative professions - artists, poets, musicians, writers, designers. Many masterpieces of art were created in a state of emotional passion. This fact is perfectly consistent with the fact that, psychologically, many geniuses, in a sense, forever remain children, capable of directly and vividly reacting to the world around them.

It is appropriate to talk about accentuation as a fixed character trait only in situations where excessive and too intense emotions are a constant characteristic of the behavior and reactions of an adult.

Emotions are a kind of energy of the human soul. They underlie the so-called reward system - a special mechanism in the psyche that provides motivation as a desire to achieve. But emotional people do not always become successful people and achieve great results. Among them there is a category called in a special way. What is a personality type in which emotions are especially vivid?

They are different

This type of personality should not be confused with the hysterical type that looks similar to it. Yes, both the first and second person will show a lot of feelings. But the exalted one shows sincere and often altruistic. But the hysterical person will only demonstrate sympathy. That is, if a good deed requires resources or effort, the affectively-exalted person will help, even if it is not appreciated. But a hysterical personality does everything only for show. Therefore, the biblical commandment about alms done in secret is more likely to be observed by an exalted personality type.

No change in speed

Sometimes people of the described type are confused with cycloids. Both are characterized by a strong reaction to external stimuli. The difference is that in cycloids not only emotions, but also the speed of thinking and other mental processes changes if external circumstances have changed. An exalted person is a person whose general condition does not change under the influence of favorable or unfavorable factors. And even more so because of internal “emotional cycles”.

Who to work with

If we talk about professions, then an exalted person is often an artist, painter or writer. However, a fairly large percentage of them work with young children. They are the ones who become sympathetic, kind and beloved educators, from whom children do not want to leave home from the nursery or kindergarten. Of course, some people cannot find themselves in life if their abilities for creative activities have not been developed. Still, such individuals are most comfortable where they can give their emotions to people. Among modern professions, an alternative can be event management, that is, the organization of holidays and other events.

Impression when communicating

An exalted person is always a sensitive nature who expresses his emotions beautifully, without self-violence and stress, which is what hysterics are guilty of. Exalted individuals are perceived by others as warm, kind, although overly emotional people. It is quite comfortable to be around them, but they cannot become specialists of the highest class if the work does not involve creativity.

Comes from childhood

What to do if a person close to you belongs to the type described? Try to protect his material interests, create for him an atmosphere of protection and love. All people need this, but exalted individuals especially. This will make your loved one happy and confident in the future. You need to handle such children with care - they are very vulnerable, and whether the owner of a sensitive psyche can successfully adapt to society depends on a kind attitude towards them.

In psychology, exaltation is considered as a special property of temperament, close to psychopathy. The feelings and experiences of an exalted personality are always somewhat exaggerated. He sees the world in black and white, not noticing halftones. An exalted person clearly shows emotions where other people do not even notice a reason for joy or sadness. Exaltation is characteristic of sanguine and choleric people. Women are more likely to have this trait than men.

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