The word depressive comes from depress, stemming from the Latin depressare, meaning to “press down.” For example, we can press down on, or depress, a lever. Whenever you press a key or drive and step on the gas pedal, you engage in a depressing motion. It doesn’t mean you were melancholic and sobbing as your foot moved downward on the pedal; it just means you pressed down on it.

Cleary, depress is not synonymous with a mood, so one would think that if you Google “definition of depressive” or “definition of depression,” you’d get some derivative of pressing down on, and the mental health condition would be just one of the definitions available.

Nope. Those searches led right to Mayo Clinic and other high-falutin’ psych websites telling you everything you want to know about depression, as in “persistent low mood, yada, yada, yada.” At that, these sites don’t mention the other meanings of depressive in psychology, as it can refer to a state, a characteristic, or a phase, as follows:

As a state, depressive would refer to a depressive disorder, something episodic. It indeed is marked by a low (i.e., depressed—can you see where the term for the psychological pathology arose from?) or bad mood; changes in sleep, appetite, and energy; negative thinking, etc. It comes in various forms, each marked by how prevalent certain symptoms are or how they cluster.

For instance, someone with melancholic major depressive episodes has symptoms of a........

© Psychology Today