Humanities Homework Help

For this two-part discussion activity, you are comparing/contrasting unipolar and bipolar depression.

Step 1. Describe what the experience can look like for people with unipolar vs. bipolar depression. How might it feel differently for the people involved? What might it look like for those watching, whether they are friends, family, and/or strangers? What can look similar between the two forms of depression, and what can look different?

This is the kind of description you could give to people who know nothing about psychology and are not interested in the clinical facts, but want to know what depression feels and looks like on a basic human level. 

Reply to:
Unipolar depression can be seen taking form in various ways, and a lot of the time the symptoms go unnoticed. Someone struggling with unipolar depression is likely going to be well, sad, the majority of the time and hopeless. These feelings are hard to detect sometimes though because we as people are taught to shove down our feelings for the sake of school, work, to appease others etc. Something I’ve noticed as both a bystander of someone going through depression and having gone through it myself, is how often people with depression will be disinterested and dissociated; both of which are symptoms that fly under the radar. Likewise, many people with unipolar depression struggle with anhedonia, which is a loss of interest in things that used to bring them joy. This symptom has varying levels of intensity but it’s a core symptom of unipolar depression, more specifically, of major depressive disorder. This symptom tends to be seen a lot when friends or family ask the depressed person to hang out, make plans, etc., and they will say no or make up excuses of why they can’t. From a friends perspective this can feel like they don’t care or don’t like you, but it’s not personal. Reclusiveness is a sign they are struggling, and if you aren’t sure about the circumstance it’s best to always check in on your friends and family and ask them. From an internal perspective, anhedonia feels honestly like numbness, or lack of drive to do anything. It can be incredibly debilitating to the point where you feel a loss of identity, or can’t find hope and motivation in anything. Oftentimes these feelings are accompanied by negative self-talk, or otherwise pessimism, as well.

Bipolar depression is a bit different, mainly because of the way bipolar disorders are episodic and switch from hypo/mania to depression, can have mixed episodes, and so forth. The depressive episodes look a lot like unipolar depression and it can be really hard to differentiate between the two, especially if you’ve never seen and/or recognized the person experiencing mania as well. Mania is shown by increased impulsivity, grandiosity, quickened thought and speech patterns, and can even have psychotic symptoms as well. The internal feeling of this is often described as “drug-like” as it can feel incredibly euphoric, like you’re on top of the world and nothing else matters. From my experience as someone who’s been diagnosed with bipolar I, the emotions that arise throughout the episodes (I’m talking about the switches between mania and depression) can be really difficult to deal with, especially when it comes to the aftermath of mania; recognizing all of your impulsive decisions and how they affected not only yourself but the people around you can feel extremely embarrassing. From other people’s perspectives, it has been described to me that they feel as though they couldn’t recognize me in my mania, like I was a completely different set out on self destruction and not making much sense, but inwardly I felt amazing. It’s really hard to take into consideration a person’s internal context when you’re seeing them shift between bouts of mania and depression, and it’s even harder to recognize the symptoms. This is especially true with hypomania, which is essentially mania with a lower intensity, and doesn’t have much, if any, psychotic symptoms associated with it. Hypomania in a person can be viewed as almost like they finally got better, they might seem happy and like their depression just melted away somehow, but that’s not the case at all.