Is there a difference between mental anguish and depression?

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I was diagnosed with depression over 10 years ago. Sometimes I wonder if I am really depressed. It feels more like pain, sadness, or mental anguish. My pain/sadness/mental anguish is directly related to incidents in my life. It seems reasonable for me to have pain/sadness/mental anguish about these things. It might explain why medication has never worked with my depression.

I would say there is a difference. Antidepressants merely normalized me. I am still quite capable of sadness and anguish, which is different from the loss of creativity, apathy, loss of energy, irritibility, seeing everything in a negative light. and loss of memory of anything positive of depression. I expected to lose a lot of intelligence while grieving the loss of my brother, and did, but I'm okay now.

I think there's a difference. They keep wanting to put me on anti-depressants, I don't want them. I don't think I'm depressed. Mabe it's just what we do show comes accross looking like we're depressed. Or maybe they think we should be depressed because of "what's wrong with us."

Someone once told me "You're not depressed, you're just incredibly FRUSTRATED."

I'm still pondering that.

Yes; that's what I had all those years' mental anguish, not depression. I had depression a little when I was a kid, but it went away on its own... maybe just into the back of my head and leading up to what I have now? I only got depression this year.

In my experience, depression makes it easy to find reasons to be unhappy (and "unhappiness" can take many miserable forms -- "mental anguish" is certainly one of them.) Since my "reasons" for feeling unhappy weren't particularly good reasons -- which is to say, none of them were really that bad -- I knew, intellectually, that I was unhappy because I was depressed. But it felt like it was because of the "bad things" in my life. If the "bad things" had been worse, I might have thought I was having a normal emotional reaction, and questioned whether I was depressed. But there are a lot of people who experience all kinds of tragedy and horror, who recover and feel normal most of the time. I think if your usual emotional state is mental anguish or sadness or pain, then you must be depressed.

What medications have you tried? Even the drugs that supposedly have the same mechanism, like SSRIs, can have different effects. Also, have you considered something like cognitive-behavioral therapy?

I also don't think I've experienced much "real" depression. Usually it's an extreme mental anguish and agitation. I get very bad reactions to antidepressants and good reactions to some mood stabilizers/anticonvulsants. I tend to be very emotionally hypersensitive, but when something really upsetting to me isn't happening, I tend to be happier than most.