Hey, deserving listeners. Two days ago, I published an episode in which I talked about grief theory. It was for patrons only.

I went into detail on Freud, a little bit on Melanie Klein, a lot into the dual process and other kinds of issues.

And so listen to that episode. And in this episode, I'm going to answer emails about grief. So let's get into it.

This first question is from Superfan Louise. She writes, grief feels similar to depression, except for the way grief can come in intense waves when you least expect it.

How is grief related to depression? Great question. Louise, it's complicated. It kind of depends on the definition of depression that we use and also how one understands depression and also the definition of grief.

And how one understands grief. These are constructs in psychology. We construct the definition and then we apply it. It's a model of how to look at people and how to categorize people.

Depression is a very varied thing. There's a lot of different experiences that we will call depression and grief as well.

There's a lot of different people who we would categorize as experiencing grief, grief emotionality, grief-free activity, who are very different from each other.

So of course, there's going to be some overlap. And categorically and diagnostically, if we were to use the diagnosis of complicated grief, there's a lot of comorbidity between complicated grief and depression.

Some would say that if you are depressed going through an complicated grief process, that the depressive symptoms are just a part of the complicated grief, other people would say that they're different.

So really, to answer your question, Louise, is that how is grief related to depression? Well, it depends on the definitions that you're using for both of those constructs and how you apply them and how you assess them.

What I will say is that for grief, when we lose something, when we have a go-through a loss, we will have a wide variety of emotions potentially.

Not everyone has the same emotions, but we all have the potential upon losing something, upon going through grief, to feel what we might call depression, meaning that we might be chronically sad, chronically unmotivated.

Chronically pessimistic, chronically difficulty getting out of bed, this kind of thing.

But if it's longstanding and once the grief goes away, because you know, grief, typically when someone's going through grief, it's very focused, not always, but it usually is, meaning that, let's say you go through a divorce and a year later, you have that, you refer to that wave of emotion.

Well, usually when you're having that wave of emotion, you're thinking about a particular thing, you know, that's, you're feeling the loss, or that you have this longing feeling, or you feel hurt that the loss happened, you're angry at the person for leaving you or something like that.

With depression, typically what we're using that term for is when people are just kind of generally depressed, and they might not have a thing that they're reacting to, if that makes any sense.

But, you know, it really just depends. The other distinction that I will say here is that typically for depressed individuals, people that we label as suffering from major depression, is they lack motivation.

Everything in life is, is met. Nothing is pleasurable, and it's pretty much constant, is that, that experience. With grief, you know, you might have moments of that, but that's not the dominant feeling of grief.

The grief usually involves pain, longing, hopelessness, sadness, crying, wanting to talk about it, anger, you know, these kinds of typical grief experiences, and they're really different things.

They get conflated, I think, because we avoid the whole conversation about grief and depression, and they just kind of get lumped into like negative experiences, if that makes any sense.

But they're really quite different. Having said that, depending on your definition, they might be the same thing.

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