Depression

I was reading a book today (it’s a really good book so far) and the author used the word depression in two sentences. “The pedestal that she had originally believed to be a stalagmite had a shallow, bowl-like depression in the top. A pool of dust had gathered within the depression, obscuring the color of the stone.” (Paolini, pg., 40). This piqued my interest and attention. I thought it was a very clever use of the word.

I remembered that depression means to be pressed in. This was different for me, as my exposure to the word depression has been as a clinical psychology and mental health term, specifically a diagnosis. The word depression is primarily used to classify a set of symptoms that were observed in people.

Reading the word in the sentence, in the book, made it sound naked. Like ‘oh, it’s just a word’ - it made it sound neutral. There is nothing attached to the word; it is simply a word that is being used as an adjective.

When I read the sentence in the book, I thought “oh right, depression can mean to be pushed down”. I wasn’t confident in this remembering of what the word depression meant, so as I do with words that are unfamiliar, I looked it up on Google to define it. I usually write define: depression (or whatever word I’m looking up) in the search bar and press enter to see what comes up. Typically a definition of the word comes up.

This time when I wrote: ‘define: depression’ a million results came up that were all about depression as a mental health disorder.

Then, in the search bar, I typed in ‘word depression’ and again the first hit was a mental health resource. The second was the typical define function I see when I look up words. They gave me five definitions of depression - the first one being defined as symptoms of a psychiatric diagnosis. The next, depression as used in economics, meteorology, astronomy, and geography.

I still wasn’t getting the true definition of depression. Like what does this mean as a word on its own without the cultural context the word plays in now? So, I did more digging; in the search bar, I entered the phrase ‘origin of word depression’ and there it was. The definition of the word and where it came from. It originated from the Latin word which means ‘to press down’ further it went to say that in the 14th century, ‘to depress’ meant to subjugate.

I didn’t know what subjugate meant and so I looked that up next to get the full picture and it means to ‘bring under domination or control, especially by conquest.’ All these definitions were fed through Google from various dictionaries online.

Depression.

The word depression has had a long journey. Lots of meaning has been attached to the word depression since its introduction to the English language.

In the picture that accompanies this blog post, did you notice the depressions in the sand?

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Reference

Paolini, Christopher. To Sleep in a Sea of Stars. Tom Doherty Associates, 2020.