Just wanted to gather thoughts on this - at what point can you say someone is genuinely depressed, or whether they are just attention-seeking? If you don't have any physical symptoms/signs (sleeping problems, eating problems, weight loss, attempting suicide, lying in bed all day), how can you be sure that what you're feeling is real, or whether it's just fabricated by your own mind because it feels better to feel bad and wallow in constant self-pity?

I ask because I definitely feel sad and hopeless most of the time, but I still function well and reason rationally, and don't have the guts to kill myself. I have had suicidal ideation in the past, but I always just wrote that off as shameful immaturity and self-pity especially since I never even acted on it. It feels like I am doing a disservice and trivialising genuinely depressed peoples' feelings if I were to say I was 'depressed'. So, despite feeling like crap for the majority of the last few years, I am 99% convinced that I am not clinically depressed. I am now questioning this.

How do you differentiate the two? And if you are to say "we all feel things differently - depression is always real," is it possible that one day, everyone will trivialise 'depression' and self-pity becomes an excuse?