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.