Giovanna Spantigati

Depression is a disorder of the "tone of the mood". The tone of the mood is an important psychic function of the mood adapting to our inner world and outer worlds. It is flexible, which means that it flexes upward when we are in positive and favorable situations, but bends down when we find ourselves in negative and unpleasant situations.

Depression is when the mood tone loses its flexibility, goes down and is no longer influenced by favorable external conditions. Using a metaphor, a person who is ill with depression feels as if he had put on four, five pairs of dark glasses and looked at external reality through them, having a totally black and negative vision. Depression is characterized by a series of symptoms, and the lowering of tone is a constant humoral condition.

In milder or initial stages, depression may be experienced as the inability to feel an adequate affective resonance or as an emotional lability. In the acute stages, mood disorder is evident and it shows up with feelings of deep sadness, moral pain, despair, dismay, associated with the loss of vital strength and with the inability to experience joy and pleasure. Patients experience a sense of continuous boredom, have no interest in normal activities, have feelings of detachment and inadequacies in daily work performance. Everything appears intractable, insurmountable, what was once simple becomes difficult, everything is grey, it becomes impossible to take part in social life, nothing can stimulate the slightest interest. The patient complains that he doesn't feel any affection for his family, he feels dull and empty, and he is not able to cry. The psychomotor slowdown is considered the most frequent symptom and it occurs with both a reduction of spontaneous movements and with a tightening of the facial expressions. Look becomes blank. The language isn't fluid any more, themes and content of ideas become poor, the answers are brief, sometimes monosyllabic. The slowdown is also expressed conceptually and it shows up as a painful feeling of sluggishness and mental emptiness. The person who is depressed has also a profound sense of fatigue, and finds difficult to take any action, even the most simple. (Dr. Salvatore Di Salvo) End of Part Two.


Giovanna Spantigati