Ambition diminishes if not disappears, as does self-confidence. Making a decision becomes difficult if not impossible. Meeting life's responsibilities, whether at home or work is done poorly if at all. Conversely, some depressed individuals use sleep as an escape. I know of one woman who would pack her children off to school in the morning, then go back to bed.
Good news brings almost no relief, while a heightened sense of guilt and shame hangs over life.
There is, in short, a constant feeling of helplessness and hopelessness. For fourteen years I watched my level of disability increase. The increase was not a steady progression, but a series of plateaux, each at a higher level of disability than the last. Thus for the first several years following presentation of the illness, life continued largely unchanged. Nearly three years into it, for example, I walked more than a mile with my year old daughter in a back carrier.