“Hey, how are you?”

“I’m depressed.”

But are you really? Do you even know what depression is, or how serious of a condition it is? And no, depression isn’t hating coming to school because it’s “boring” or you’d rather be at home playing video games, or sleeping until 12 PM.

According to National Institute of Mental Health “depression”  defined as, “a major depressive disorder or clinical depression [that] is a common but serious mood disorder [that] causes severe symptoms that affect how you feel, think, and handle daily activities, such as sleeping, eating, or working.”

An accurate definition in a conventional sense, but this definition fails to convey the agony one feels when they are truly depressed and the turbulent effects of depression on your life and your relationships.

Depression is when you can see yourself slowly lose interest in everything that you liked to do, and being helpless about it. It’s wanting to hang out with your friends, to call them, or text them but physically and emotionally feeling paralyzed because society and their impossibly flawless standard  has given you such a negative perception about yourself that when you look in the mirror, or you try to look at yourself through someone else’s eyes, the only thing you can see are flaws.

Have you ever had thoughts like this? Imagine having these thoughts haunt you every moment of your consciousness, along with other thoughts of self deprecation and the constant ache of never being enough for anything or anyone.

And the worst part about depression is that it comes back. One day you will be laughing, surrounded by a bunch of people that you love, and a tiny incident, an incident that probably went unnoticed by everyone else will throw you back into the abyss of sadness that your crawled out of.  

It comes back to haunt you just when you thought you escaped it.  

Depression is not a joke, it’s not “cool”  and we need to stop treating it like it is.

Using depression as a synonym to describe temporary sadness or melancholy deriving from something that you’ll forget in two days overshadows how serious true depression is, and the fact that it takes and ruins countless lives without any impartiality; depression kills.