Depression Tends to Snowball

Most of the problems that trouble us - flu, mumps, other illnesses - have identifiable causes and result in specific symptoms. The symptoms are, in effect, end-points in a causal chain.

In depression the symptoms tend to feed back on the problem and intensify the other symptoms, resulting in a snowball effect - or, to go to the other end of the heat spectrum, a wildfire.

In this post I discuss this phenomenon and what it means for treatment.