Depression is a mental health condition, a mood disorder  where a child or adult experiences difficulty regulating emotions. Depression often negatively affects how you feel, the way you think and how you act.

Other depressive symptoms include sadness, loss of interest in activities you’ve once enjoyed, difficulty concentrating, feeling withdrawn and hopeless, just to name a few.

In the case of depression, anger can take several different forms. Below are three of the most common kinds of anger you or your loved one might experience when living with depression.

Irritability

Despite being recognized as a feature itself in depression, irritability is not always highlighted as go-to symptom. It is sometimes overlooked for unipolar depression or mistakenly linked only bipolar disorder.

Another misconception is that irritability primarily affects adolescents – or adult men who live with depression. Studies have long shown that irritability occurs as a common symptom of depression with children and adults, both male and female.

Irritability may present in

• snapping at others
• feeling inpatient
• not wanting to be touched or held
• being restless
• being unable to handle small disappointments or challenges.

Further, decreased functioning in the frontal lobe interferes with judgment and reasoning when you have depression, so many who have a mood disorder interpret situations, experiences, thoughts and feelings in negative ways. Irritability in depression can be episode or situational, or present in a more chronic manner.

Hostility

Going a step beyond irritability is hostility, which is defined as a person with depression who expresses anger outwardly. Most often hostile-depression gets expressed towards other people or about external issues in the environment.

Sometimes a child or adult will outwardly be aggressive toward a friend or family member, attacking others for their opinions, thoughts or more materialistic things like how they dress, look, etc. Hostility tends to develop in individuals who’ve experienced trauma from their environment.

They mistrust others and feel hopeless and helpless about the world around them. This insecurity doesn’t present in a quiet depressive restlessness, but rather an external demanding, cynical and negativistic style. Studies have found that depressed children and adults who have experienced loss may have higher rates of hostility.

Anger Attacks

Escalating more intensely than irritability and hostility are anger attacks, sometimes called rage reactions. Studies have shown that children and adults who have particular deficits in the serotonergic system and the autonomic arousal network can fly into angry outbursts in response to trivial matters. Or remain angry longer than a situation may call for such an emotion.

In one study, 1/3 of subjects who were diagnosed with unipolar depression presented with sudden spells of anger attacks accompanied by symptoms of autonomic activation such as tachycardia, sweating, hot flashes, and tightness of the chest. Anger attacks can be very emotionally and physically draining for the child or adult who experiences them. So too, it can be overwhelming for family, friends or others to endure.

5 Tips to Help with Anger

Anger is a common emotion that can be destructive when it isn’t responded to in an adaptive manner. When you live with a depressive disorder you’re likely to experience one, more or all of these anger experiences. To help minimize irritability, hostility and anger attacks, consider the following.

Deborah Serani, Psy.D. is a psychologist and an award-winning author. Visit her at drdeborahserani.com