Emily’s doctors say she suffers from “masked depression” instead of what she thought was heart trouble. You might ask: What is that? Can it be treated? If she had a depression, she now has anxiety as well.

Smiling depression, hidden depression, depressive equivalent and masked depression all are names from a major health problem that can “hide” from both a patient and from his/her doctors. Masked depression sufferers, for the most part, are middle-to-upper class women between 40 and 60 years of age, yet many men suffer from it also.

It is one of the most common conditions seen in medical practice yet often is ignored or diagnosed as something else. According to some authorities, as many as 10 percent to 18 percent of all patients seeing physicians actually are depressed and half of them are unaware of it.

Masked depressives often appear to be suffering from some physical illness, such as pain in the joints and/or other parts of the body, heart conditions, headaches, neuralgia, constriction in the throat and chest, dry mouth, vague stomach pains, nausea, vomiting, constipation, vaginal discharge, various sex problems, bouts of sweating and frequent feelings of almost total exhaustion.

Most patients with masked depression deny any depressive feelings or blame them on the physical illness that they believe they have. Consequently, physicians may spend years trying to diagnose a masked depressive’s physical problems only to finally prove that the complaints stem from depression.

Once such diagnosis is established, highly effective treatment can be started. Most often treatment is a combination of antidepressant medicines and psycho-therapy. The best news is that all those symptoms disappear once the depression is under control.