The Huffington Post ran a feature this summer attempting to illustrate the actual feeling of depression, including the physical symptoms that often lead initially to misdiagnosis. The article can be found at THIS LINK.

“In general, the worse the painful physical symptoms, the more severe the depression,” researchers wrote in an overview of depression and physical symptoms in the Journal of Clinical Psychology. “Symptoms have been found to increase the duration of depressed mood.”

In fact, patients often first complain of physical symptoms to a primary care physician, making depression more apt to be misdiagnosed.