There are some significant differences to determine whether you are actually depressed or whether you are just feeling sad. Every day problems with family, friends or at work can be very stressful and can leave you feeling sad and vulnerable sometimes in your life, but this doesn't necessarily mean that you're depressed. Depression usually starts when all the problems mounting up your life, even the really smal ones, have an unusally strong impact on how you react to them. This could be a crescendo of problems that has built up putting more and more pressure on you gradually. Depression is the point when these things become so difficult to cope with and unbearable that someting happens in your mind and you just can't seem to find the energy or motivation to deal or cope with these problems. Eventually, this leads on to you feeling anxious and paranoid about new problems evolving and starts to make you feel suicidal.

The chances are that if you are truly depressed, then you will most likely suffer with a lot of automatic negative thoughts and believe that you are thinking too much or that your mind is going into overtime. You then become paranoid about why there is so much activity going on in your mind and in turn you lead yourself into a downward spiral of thinking traps which just leads to more anxiety, paranoia and depression. You will probably also feel very uncomfortable in certain social situations, particularly where there are a lot of people present and you may even feel that all of them are focusing their attention on you. If you do not suffer with any of these symptoms but simply feel down, then you are probably just feeling sad.