Reactive depression

Reactive depression is one of the clinical manifestations of reactive psychosis. It develops on the basis of acute stress associated with strong emotional shocks of a negative nature, for example, withdrawal from life of loved ones, crisis situations in financial and professional spheres, natural disasters, etc.

The main feature of reactive depression is that a person is completely fixated on what happened, he again and again scrolls in the head of these events, not being able to focus on something else. Everything that has happened becomes a subject of obsession for him. The patient experiences constant depression, often closes in himself, cries, refuses to eat and does not sleep well. In a dream, he sees all the same circumstances that caused him stress and he develops the fear of nightmares, which is why he tries to give up sleep altogether, which in turn can lead to serious malfunctions in the work of the nervous system and the appearance of hallucinations.

Symptoms of reactive depression

Often reactive depression, the symptoms of which may appear some time after the tragedy, leads to the fact that a person builds everything that happened in a certain cult, transforming memories of it into a meaning of further existence and correlating with these events all his subsequent behavior, from the choice of clothes and ending with daily routine.

It can also happen that at first the poor man lives, as if on autopilot, then, in particular acute cases, in his mind, there can be a substitution of reality. For example, he can argue that his deceased loved one did not die at all, but left for a short time and will react very violently if he is tried to convince him. Develops the so-called psychogenic depression, whose roots are sometimes hidden in the genetic predisposition of a person to schizophrenia . In fact, both reactive and psychogenic depression are two branches of the same tree and have basically the same predisposing factors.

In the case of diagnosing reactive depression, the patient should be treated exclusively medically with the use of antipsychotics and under the strict supervision of the attending physician.