Not Your Typical Depression

Here’s a story. Dexter exhibits depression-like qualities. Debra notices it. To a friend or a psychologist — all else being equal — she may give one, or more, of the following possible descriptions:

(a) “Dexter has depression,”
(b) “Dexter is depressed,”
(c) “Dexter is depressing.”

If the science of psychological testing is a formalization of informal testing, I call to question: is there a difference between these assessments? Can he meet one without necessarily meeting another? Let me show you why I believe in the affirmative, at least for the sake of discussion.

(a) approximates what Debra implies by clinical depression. If she is correct, this is the deep-lasting-if-not-acute category. Psychology has a good idea of what that entails, how to test it, and how to treat it. (b) approximates what Debra implies by mood. If discrete, this is the short-lasting category. Dexter may have lost his girlfriend recently.

(c) approximates what Debra implies by personality. This one is special in that it is also about her: how she feels about Dexter — with the aura she is getting from him. Dexter is depressing to Debra, but maybe not to Daniel. Maybe Dexter is not depressing to anyone but Debra, who has come to know him for who he really is. Being subjective, I believe (c) is the most complex, the hardest to distinguish and capture with your conventional psychological test. Being atypical, I also believe (c) is the most intriguing, for it has many branches. Let me show you one.

When Debra says (a) or (b), she is suggesting there is something disabling about Dexter. This is less necessarily the case if she says (c). Dysthymic or not, Dexter may have a melancholic personality. Yet interestingly, even that is not necessary to come off as a depressing person to someone. Why? The absence of a strong positive affect is not the same as the presence of a strong negative affect. I suspect in psychological testing, the former may conflate with many of the same symptoms as the latter.

Wait! There’s more to this. The possibility of being ‘high-functioning,’ say in school or work, while showing much of the symptoms that would suggest depression, is probably most observable with (c). If so, how? Maybe, the person is able to somehow control and mask it, or the person does not have your “typical” depression. This exceptional reality stands apart from the dictum of testing…

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