What happens when something bad happens in your life?
There is a difference between clinical depression and what we commonly refer to as feeling depressed or sad. There's a difference between an appropriate emotional response to something that happens in one's life that may include pain, sadness, or grief and clinical depression. Interestingly, depression can actually dampen emotions-- where there's no up or down, just a constant feeling of apathy and emptiness. Many people, when clinically depressed, react the same way to, say, a family member dying as they do to winning the lottery. There's no range of emotion, which I'll get to later in this post.
One common misconception about depression is that it's a result of something bad happening in one's life. This isn't always the case. Though depression may start that way, clinical depression is a different animal, and it's a chemical imbalance in the brain that we are only now starting to understand.
Do you just up the dosage?
Most people only up their medication dosages when they have a mood episode, not when they just plain feel bad. In my case, I know the difference. There's a component to true sadness that still makes you feel connected to the universe, a component that is conspicuously absent when you're depressed. I feel sad, stressed, and frustrated a lot, but for the most part it's not something that requires changing medication, but instead requires introspection, changing behavior, exercise, and/or just waiting it out.
And what about feelings in general? Are they all dimmed down or just the sad ones?
This is another common misconception. The goal of treating mental illness is to give a patient a full range of normal, healthy emotions expressed at appropriate times. That means ups, downs and everything in between. The goal isn't to make people somehow artificially happy. Depression isn't a normal emotion, it's a deadening of the spirit, if that makes any sense. Many people also suffer from mania, which is the opposite of depression-- being too "up." If you've ever done amphetamines or other stimulants, mania can be very similar-- you don't sleep, you don't eat, you get very focused, and you feel like you're on top of the world. This high feeling, though, is not reflective of what is going on in the real world and is an inappropriate response to external stimuli. The trouble that most people have, even experienced mental health professionals, is determining in some patients what a full range of emotions is and whether their pain or euphoria are appropriate emotional responses or are clinically significant. In some cases it's obvious-- a patient who is actively hallucinating or a patient who can't get out of bed in the morning are pretty clear cut cases.
Unfortunately, mental illness also effects real emotions. In my case, I am bipolar, but I also have emotions-- one of which is fear of another severe mood episode. They tend to get tangled up with one another, and that's something a therapist can help with. Unfortunately, therapy can't work unless the primary mood episode is treated enough that one can actively participate in the therapy.
If you ask most people who have had a major mood episode, they will tell you that the medicine neither made their problems go away, stopped them from caring about their problems, or made them suddenly happy. Instead, they give you some relief from pain (or euphoria in the case of mania) so that you're able to deal with things rationally.
Again, depression and mania tend to blunt the range of emotions, which treatment hopes to bring back, not the opposite.
Does your body develop a resistance to the drugs over time? coz drugs tend to do that
This is something that's still debated in the psychiatric world, but generally people do have breakthrough episodes where they need to reevaluate their medication dosages. For me, I have actually reduced my medication dosages as well as increased them as necessary. This is pretty common. It's something this is generally not seen in addictions, which seems to be what you were referring to.
There's a huge difference between drugs that create artificial highs and states of mind and drugs that seek to restore a healthy balance in the body. I always say that I don't use drugs recreationally because I take drugs daily to help me feel normal.
I think you'd agree that cocaine and drugs that treat diabetes are completely different in what they seek to do. In the same way as mental illness, Type 1 diabetics can help control their disease with diet, but no diet is going to fix the diabetes completely. In the case of mental illness, therapt and mental hygeine are analougous to a diabetic's diet.
It's very hard to understand what true clinical mood episodes are until you've experienced them. My mother didn't understand mine for years until she had a major mood episode. She suddenly "got it" after that because she'd been there. I don't blame anyone for not understanding what it's like to be depressed, manic, or psychotic, but I do expect that people view mental illness just as they do any other disease. In the end, they are all some sort of process in the body that goes haywire.
As an example, my husband has a heart arrhythmia that makes his heart beat erratically and very quickly. Sometimes it's stress induced, other times it's out of nowhere. The analogy that I draw is this-- everyone's heart beats. We can't live without that, obviously. However, in his case, for whatever reason, it just starts beating the wrong way. It's still beating, but in such a way that it's actually harmful to the body (and potentially fatal). It's the same thing with mental illness. Your brain chemicals are working fine and then for whatever reason, they stop functioning the way that they are meant to in such a way that it hurts the person. Both are adequately treated with both medication and non-medicinal treatments, normally together.
I know this was a very long post, but I hope it helps.