You're not sad, exactly. You're just done. Everyone is too loud, everything takes too long, and the smallest inconvenience lands harder than it should. You snap at people you care about and feel guilty about it, but the guilt doesn't stop you from doing it again tomorrow. You don't recognise this as depression because you're not lying in bed crying. You're functioning. You're getting things done. You just feel like you're doing it through a layer of glass, and everything on the other side irritates you.

Depression doesn't always look like sadness. For many adults, it looks more like this: a persistent, low-grade irritability that feels less like grief and more like everything is wrong and you can't explain why.

You are still getting through the day. Work is getting done, the children are being fed, the messages are being answered. You haven't stopped functioning. You've just stopped feeling much while you do it.

This is a pattern that doesn't match the common image of depression, so it often doesn't get recognised as having anything to do with depression at all. "Functional depression" is a lay term, not a clinical diagnosis, for an experience where the outward structure of a life remains intact while the interior goes quiet: a persistent flatness, a reduced capacity for enjoyment, a sense of going through the motions of a life that used to feel like yours.