Reflection Essay: Melancholy

Nothing brings relief from the existential torture.” (Depression, 1997). Everyone is subject to sadness or melancholy moods especially after tragic events such as death, dissolution of a personal relationship, or economic hardship; these feelings are normal. It is a prolonged sense of these feeling and being unable to process past them that a more serious form of depression has taken hold. The damage caused by the emotional and mental effects of depression can be far reaching from hurting and pushing away friends and family, destroying careers, and can even result in death by suicide.(Depression, 1997).

I spent the rest of the summer underneath an ocean of melancholy. Taking to sleeping during the long, burning days, I spent my nights in a wallow of self-despair. My father grew worried, and I will be forever thankful of him for offering to drive me places, just to get out of the house. Nevertheless, I lost contact with most of my friends. I stopped attending any social gatherings.

In normal life, people will sometimes suffer from depression or sickness caused by the loss of a loved one in a romantic or family relationship. This has been a part of life for hundreds of years and it is a way that authors like Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner and Horacio Quiroga connect with people all throughout the world. Using exaggerated scenarios, these authors communicate how much of an impact isolation or abandonment can have on a person physically or mentally decaying.

Sigmund Freud was an influential psychoanalyst in the late 18th century to the early 19th century. He made many advances in the field of psychology which have impacted other academic areas such as sociology and social work. In his 1915 paper “Mourning and Melancholia” he connected the normal realm with the pathological. In which he “compared mourning – a normal if painful event from which hardly anyone is spared – with a pathological although very common one: melancholia” (Fiorini et al. 2007). The natural human process is to mourn the loved subject or object when it is lost. Freud explains that grief is the feeling of losing love and once it is fully lost desolation and fear takes its place

For a long period of time, every day that I woke up, I would cry. Weep at the mere fact that I had not died. I did not want to be awake. I did not want to be alive. I hated feeling “numb”, I did not want to feel at all. It is problematic to accurately explain how and why I became depression’s slave. I never openly invited grief into my life. It invited itself and it provoked a large amount of torment. I hate admitting to the fact

Everyone has felt sadness as some point in their lives, but that does not necessarily mean that they are depressed. When someone reaches a point of depression, it could be defined as having been sad for a long period of time, having no motivation to do what once made them happy, and feeling as though there is no more hope. Along with losing all faith, there is the long lasting feelings of guilt, and many depressed people feel this way because they blame themselves for not being able to feel happy. This way of thinking stems from today’s conventional society. People are always told that they can choose optimism, choose to be happy, and it is all their fault if they are anything but. However, this way of thinking is very toxic for those who are

Our parents raise us hoping for us to develop certain character traits, but there comes to a point when we start to become our own person based on the experiences we go through, any situation, good or bad, can influence our personality mentally and emotionally. Emotion is what makes us human, it's how we cope and how we manage our crazy lives’. When our feelings get damaged or even nourished, it will change how we react

Depression is a very real and serious illness, and after losing a loved one, many people fall into deep depression and denial. The Speaker in Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “The Raven” lost his beloved wife, Lenore, and has gone into a downward spiral. He becomes so lonely, that he can no longer tell reality from fantasy. The Speaker hallucinates about a majestic Raven that is created by his subconscious to tell him that he will be alone forever. While others may disagree, the Raven in Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven” is imaginary, a figment of the Speaker’s imagination as a result of being so depressed due to his obsession with his wife’s death.

Joy and sadness are two of the strongest human emotions. The appeal towards feeling both joy and sadness was incredibly effective. Humans are emotional creatures who are able to relate to the pain and happiness of others. Watching another person feel the agony of loss, as well as, experience the kindness of another individual, brings about memories and connections to those emotions. Displaying feelings of both joy and sadness was a magnification of the way human’s emotional appeal

“If there is a god or whatever something somewhere, why have I been abandoned by everyone and everything that known? I 've ever loved? What is the lesson? What is the point? God give me a sign or I have to give up. I can 't do this anymore. Please let me die.” (Kesha,Praying). Depression has always been a problem throughout time and how people deal with it. Even though people have different backgrounds depression seems to affect them in the same way. In the book, Catcher in the Rye, Holden the main character changes after his brother Allie died. Holden seems to never get over his brother 's death which and changes his way of thinking. So how does, Justine of a completely different background who doesn 't lose a

The Entity of Sadness Humans are interdependent beings, in constant need of companionship for life unfolds with others around. In times where the world was held by loneliness and all lived tractable lives, there was no compassionate human interaction. America was suffocating within the walls of the Great Depression and humanity yearned for a simple source of communication. The times possessed a lack of enlightenment, humans were forced into a world of pure labor. Men traveled from one menial employment to the next, the facade of hope was fissured.

| |the intellectual conversation of topics that were discussed. I also enjoyed the learning |

I believe my comfort dealing with a wider range of emotions is a strength of mine, something that I can use to better understand and help a client/clients who present an array of different emotions and depths. Personally, I’m quite familiar with that of sadness and grief; having come from an unhappy home, having lost loved ones, and having my brother be in a critical accident when I was in high school have all helped me to understand the depths and severity, as well as the different ways in which they present themselves, in relation to love, sadness, depression, grief, and family.

In terms of sadness and depression, comparisons and contrasts can be made between CBT and existential therapy. Heidegger and Boss understood sadness or depression as a mood invoked by feelings of being closed off from an aspect of our freedom. They suggest that depression is a consequence of this restricted way of thinking and not the result of inner psychological conflict. Contrastingly, through Beck’s pivotal cognitive theory of emotion, CBT considers sadness or depression to be a common negative emotional response or disorder associated with thoughts and mental images from the past brought about by a viscous cycle of negative patterns of interpretation and dysfunctional reactions which further compound a negative mood. It further suggests that feelings of sadness or even depression are associated with a perception that something has been lost, actually or conceptually.

feelings can linger for years. Depression is a social disorder characterized by a depressed mood