Feeling depressed? Don't worry it's good for health

New York, United States, January 17: People try a number of ways to fight depressiondefine. Some take a bunch of pills every night before going to bed while others try to keep themselves busy in different tasks to evade this illness that, like any other illness, attacks mind, body, and spirit.

However, scientists now advise not to take a pill to beat the blues because they believe that depressiondefine might actually be good for our health, therefore it should rather be embraced.

Depression is a kind of a mental disorder that influences a person’s basic outlook towards life. It is characterized by a consistent low mood and loss of interest in usual day-to-day activities.

Depression can be caused due to various psychological or biological reasons. It is a serious condition that affects a person's general health including his work, family life, sleeping and eating habits.

Experts now suggest that medicating depression as if it is a disease could interfere with a crucial part of our biological make-up. Taking a pill to beat the blues may stop us embracing our miserable side and removes the motivation to change our lives for the better, they suggest.

They said that a bout of sadness and melancholy can leave victims better able to cope with life’s challenges and motivates them to greater achievements.

Psychiatrist professor Jerome Wakefield, of New York University believes that sadness even helps us learn from our mistakes.

"When you find something this deeply in us biologically you presume it was selected because it had some advantage - otherwise we wouldn't have been burdened with it. We're fooling around with part of our biological make-up," said Prof. Wakefield, who is the co-author of 'The Loss of Sadness: How psychiatry transformed normal sorrow into depressive disorder.’

"I think one of the functions of intense negative emotions is to stop our normal functioning - to make us focus on something else for a while," he stressed.

Depression is a devastating illness that affects every aspect of a person’s life – physical, mental and emotional. The condition influences the sufferer’s self-esteem and perception about others and a person with depression has difficulty in performing ordinary daily activities.

This kind of a mental disorder influences a person’s basic outlook towards life. It is a state of intense sadness, melancholia or despair that has advanced to the point of being disruptive to an individual's social functioning and/or activities of daily living. It often leads to constant negative thinking and sometimes substance abuse.