Depression Paper

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Assignment: Depression Paper Stress and situational depression are seen as just a part of life. As people grow and experience life they encounter events that trigger stress and signs of depression. These events can include changes in the professional world, death, and academics. Changes in mood such as these are temporary, and are pretty common. Aside from these normal occurrences actual depression, or clinical depression, is seen in 1 in 10 Americans. Clinical depression is a mental illness that that can prohibit normal daily functioning. In this assignment I will examine two forms of clinical depression, unipolar, and bipolar depression. Depression can be so debilitating that it can cause a person to become suicidal. This depression is termed Unipolar. According to The American Psychiatric Association’s DSM, Unipolar depression is described as a significant depressed period that lasts more than two weeks. During this period an individual exhibits a minimum of five depressive symptoms (Comer, 2005). Symptoms of depression can include the inability to concentrate, loss of appetite, insomnia, and daily bouts with depression. Unipolar depression is presumed to be caused by a combination of factors, as opposed to having one universal cause. According to The Black Dog Institute of Australia, depression is in part, a genetic biochemical imbalance of the neurotransmitters serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine in combination with stress ("Fact sheets," 2009, Causes of depression). The organization’s studies discovered that individuals that exhibit high levels of anxiety, which can be experienced as an “internalized 'anxious worrying' style or as a more externalized 'irritability, shyness, expressed as 'social avoidance' or 'pe... ... middle of paper ... ...nt to assist them in trying to deal with with family, work and social issues that undoubtedly occur when bipolar disorder is experienced (Comer, 2005). Unipolar and bipolar disorders may share some of the same characteristics, and may appear to be the same at times. These two types of disorders are caused in similar ways, but their treatments differ significantly from each other. Unipolar is a depression disorder, and bipolar is a mood disorder that changes drastically between depression and mania, so each disorder has to be addressed accordingly. References Comer, R. J. (2005). Fundamentals of abnormal psychology (4). New York: Worth. Fact sheets [Depression and bipolar disorder information Australia]. (2009, June 19). Black dog institute. Retrieved 3 July 2009, from http://www.blackdoginstitute.org.au/factsheets/index.cfm

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