Hacker News Reader

I've noticed it's very common to swap 'sadness' and 'depression' in american english. In brazilian portuguese we have an abreviation for "depressão" which is "deprê". Depression is the illness and "deprê" is slang for "sad" and they do not mix. It seems to me by equating both the american english is making it harder for people to realize the difference (which is tremendous).

View on HN

I wonder if the pt-br words being so similar makes the difference more explicit, that perhaps the english words being so obviously different, makes it easier to forget?

if the topic would ever come up seriously, most everyone would agree that depression is different than regular sadness- but in casual conversation it sometimes seems to warp into depression being a kind of adult form of sadness, almost as if sadness is just for children...

The hard part for me is trying to figure out if "I was depressed" means "I had depression" or "I was experiencing sadness".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com