ABSTRACT
Almost all humans have some understanding of and experience with the alteration in mood patterns. The experience of “the blues” is a common part of the human condition, but bears little resemblance to the profound feelings experienced by those with major depressive disorder. This common experience can both enhance the understanding of the experience and lead to lack of assessment for the more serious consequences of mood or affective problems. William Styron in describing his own depression discussed the “basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience. For myself the pain is most closely connected to drowning or suffocation-but even those images are off the mark” (1990, p.17).
