When Depression Doesn't Look Like Depression

When most people picture depression, they picture someone who can't get out of bed. The clichéd image is darkness, sleeping eighteen hours a day, untouched dishes, a curtain drawn shut. That picture is real for some people, and for those people the right care can be lifesaving. But it isn't the picture I see most often when adults walk into our office in West Vancouver.

The depression I see most often looks like a forty-five-year-old executive who hasn't missed a day of work in seven years and quietly cries in his car between meetings. It looks like a mother who packs her kids' lunches every morning and feels nothing while she's doing it. It looks like a graduate student who is still publishing, still presenting at conferences, and lying in the dark at 2 a.m. with a kind of hollow that has no name yet. It looks like someone — possibly you — for whom life is functional, productive, even outwardly enviable, and underneath: a quiet absence of the self that used to be there.

This is high-functioning depression. It is one of the most common, and one of the most under- recognized, presentations of depressive illness in adults today.

Why high-functioning depression hides

Depression is a condition of energy and meaning collapse, and the cultural script around it overwhelmingly emphasizes the energy collapse. We recognize fatigue, withdrawal, inability to function — those are visible. We are much slower to recognize the meaning collapse, especially in adults whose lives still look meaningful from the outside.

There are several reasons high-functioning depression goes unrecognized for years, often decades:

The structures of adult life provide their own momentum. A career, a marriage, a parenting role, a mortgage, a calendar full of obligations — these continue moving even when the person inside has stopped having an inner life. Many high-functioning depressed adults describe being carried by the structures of their life rather than living their life.

Chronic over-functioning masks the symptoms. People who have always been responsible, hard- working, and self-disciplined can ride those traits through depression for a remarkably long time before something gives. The very capacities that helped them succeed are the capacities that hide their suffering.

Internalized standards keep them from naming it. Many high-functioning adults — especially those raised in immigrant, professional, or culturally high-achieving families — have absorbed a definition of depression that requires visible breakdown. As long as they're "still doing things," they can't be depressed. So they aren't. They're just tired. They're just stressed. They're just going through a phase.

Years of low-grade compensation become the new normal. The drink at the end of the day. The constant scrolling. The sex that has stopped feeling like much. The food that doesn't taste like anything. The hobbies that have quietly disappeared. By the time these are recognizable as symptoms rather than just "how things are," they have often been the texture of life for years.

What depression actually is

It will help here to step back from the diagnostic checklists for a moment. The clinical criteria for depression — depressed mood, anhedonia, sleep changes, appetite changes, concentration problems, hopelessness, fatigue, feelings of worthlessness, thoughts of death — are all real and they all matter. But they are downstream symptoms. They are not, in themselves, what depression is.

From a depth-oriented perspective, depression is most accurately understood as a collapse of the relationship between you and your own life. The energy that used to flow toward what mattered no longer flows. The meaning that used to organize your days has gone quiet. Some part of you — sometimes a very large part — has gone underground.

This understanding matters because it changes the work. If depression is just a chemical imbalance to be corrected, the goal is restoring biological function. If depression is also a meaning-collapse, then alongside any biological work, there is psychological and existential work that the symptoms themselves are pointing toward.

A useful question — one we ask often in depth-oriented individual therapy — is what part of you has gone underground, and why? The answer is rarely random. It is usually pointing somewhere.

The signals you might recognize

Some of the signals of high-functioning depression I see most often, in case you are quietly checking:

• The flatness. Things that used to feel like something — music, food, sex, conversation, beauty — feel like much less. You aren't acutely sad. You aren't crying. You're just thinner inside.
• The disconnection from your own life. You know what you're doing but you don't quite feel the doing of it. There's a glass between you and your life.
• The slow erosion of pleasure. Anhedonia, the technical term, is one of the most reliable signals. The hobbies you used to love. The trips you used to plan. The person you used to be excited to come home to. Slowly, less.
• The performance of being okay. You have learned exactly what to say so that people don't ask follow-up questions. I'm good. Just busy. You know how it is.
• The night thinking. During the day you are functional, even productive. At night, alone, the thoughts come — about whether your life is the right life, about what you've given up, about whether anyone really sees you. They go away in daylight.
• The bodily signature. Sleep that isn't restorative. Appetite that has gone strange in one direction or the other. A general heaviness. Sometimes pain that has no medical cause.
• The questions that have stopped. When did you last ask yourself what you actually wanted? When did you last imagine a different version of your life? Many high-functioning depressed adults have stopped imagining altogether — and the imagining is one of the first things to go.

If three or four of these are familiar, you may be carrying more than you've named.

What's underneath

In a great many cases, high-functioning depression in adults is connected to a few recurring underlying patterns:

A life that has stopped being yours. Many of the depressed adults I work with built their adult lives around expectations that were never quite their own — a parent's plan, a culture's plan, a partner's plan, a younger self's plan that has stopped fitting. The depression is, in some ways, a protest from the part of you that knows.

Disowned parts of the self. Most high-functioning adults have built their functioning by exiling certain parts of themselves — the angry part, the wanting part, the artist part, the rest-needing part, the one who needed care and didn't get it. The exiled parts don't disappear. They go underground and become depression. (See: Internal Family Systems →.)

Unprocessed grief. Many depressions in midlife are unprocessed grief — for parents, for marriages, for younger selves, for paths not taken, for losses that were never named as losses. Grief that doesn't move becomes depression that doesn't move. (See: Grief Counselling →.)

Burnout that has crossed a line. Burnout and depression overlap heavily, and what begins as a stress response can settle into clinical depression if not addressed. (See: Burnout Therapy →.)

Cultural and immigration-related layers. For Iranian-Canadian and other immigrant clients, depression often carries unprocessed immigration grief, identity dislocation, or intergenerational material that needs to be named before it can move.

When to consider therapy

The honest answer: when it has been going on long enough, or hurts deeply enough, that it is taking up real estate inside you that is no longer available for life. You don't have to wait for a crisis. You don't have to be falling apart. The threshold for high-functioning depression is much lower than the threshold for visible breakdown — and crossing it earlier almost always shortens the recovery.

Specific signals that mean it's time:

• You've been feeling this way for more than a few months
• The structures of your life are still working but the inside has gone quiet
• You catch yourself thinking, often, that you don't know what would actually make you happy anymore
• You've considered therapy before and talked yourself out of it because "you're not that bad"
• People close to you have noticed something
• You sometimes have passive thoughts about not existing, even briefly (these need clinical attention regardless of severity)

If any of those resonate, please reach out. Not because we promise you'll feel better next week — depth-oriented work doesn't move that fast — but because the work has somewhere to go, and the alternative is continuing to slowly disappear inside a life that should be feeding you.

How we work with depression at Baraka

Depression therapy at Baraka is depth-oriented and integrative. We do not treat the symptom in isolation. We work with what's underneath — the disowned parts, the meaning collapse, the cultural and family layers, the grief that hasn't moved — alongside the practical scaffolding (sleep, nervous system regulation, behavioural activation, coordination with your physician if medication is part of the picture) that keeps daily life manageable while the deeper work unfolds.

Sessions are 50 minutes. Most clients begin weekly through the active work and shift to biweekly as things stabilize. We work in English and Farsi, in person at our Ambleside office and online across BC.

If reading this has named something for you, that is itself meaningful. Naming is the beginning.

• Book a free 15-minute consultation → Or call (236) 455-6306 Email contact@barakaocc.com