Clinical Depression

There will be many topics covered as you continue to read that are related to depression. Clinical Depression is a very serious disorder that affects millions of people in the United States every year. There are many reasons for depression and there are also many signs and symptoms that can help you to identify depression that is affecting someone close to you. Depression can be treated in different forms weather it is through the use of anti depressants, coping, cognitive-behavioral and psychotherapy. There are many situations that can cause each person to get depressed for different reasons and may affect everyone in different ways and have different severities.

Depression is a mood disorder involving disturbances in emotion (excessive sadness), behavior (loss of interest in one’s usual activities), cognition (thoughts of hopelessness), and body function (fatigue and loss of appetite) (Wade, Tavris 567). Most people don’t even know when depression is happening to them. It usually takes friends, family, or even doctors to notice the symptoms of depression within somebody they know. People that are depressed have the tendency to describe their mood as gloomy, miserable, dreary or uneasy. A lot of victims of depression have additional feelings of worthlessness, doubt, emptiness, pointlessness, unreasonable guilt, boredom, despair, and weakness.

Everyone feels sad at some point — it's only natural. But what doctors call clinical depression is very different from just being "down in the dumps." The main difference is that the sad or empty mood doesn't go away after a couple of weeks, and everyday activities like sleeping, socializing or working can be affected.

When someone says the word depression, it causes a great deal of confusion to American people today. Frequently, depression is used to describe when someone is feeling low, miserable, or having ‘gotten out of bed on the wrong side'. However, doctors use the word in two different ways. They can use it to describe the symptom of low mood, or to refer to a specific illness, Depression. Doctors make a diagnosis of depression after assessing the severity of the low mood, other associated symptoms and the duration of the problem. People who have experienced an episode of depression are at risk of developing another in the future. A small amount of people may experience an incidence of depression as part of a type of bipolar disorder, manic depression, which is characterized by episodes of both low and high dispositions.

I learned that there are many different kinds of depression, each divided into sub-categories. Clinical Depression is divided into Major Depression, Dysthymia, and Manic Depressive/Bipolar Illness. Major Depression includes a combination of symptoms, and is often severe and can be disabling. Dysthymia, is less severe, and is typically not disabling. Manic Depressive/Bipolar Illness is common, and cycles between Depression and Mania. It can virtually affect every aspect of someones life (Grohol). Some of the symptoms for Depression include: sad/empty mood, loss of interest in ordinary activities, sleeping more or less, eating more or less, difficulty concentrating, making decisions, feelings of hopelessness or worthlessness, guilt, irritability, increased crying, loss or gain of weight, and chronic aches/pains that are unresponsive to treatment. Mania symptoms include: boundless energy, increased activity, poor judgment, easily distracted, decreased sleep, and disorganized speech. It is currently unknown what the cause of depression is, but it is believed to be chemical imbalances in the frontal lobe of the brain. Certain medicatio...

This essay is about the different types of depression and how it can affect a person’s life. I accessed a couple different websites to do my research for this essay. The first one is “Depression Fact Sheet: Depression Statistics and Depression Causes”, which I used primarily to get the statistics on depression. This was co-written by two people who work in the field of psychology, Dr. Bob Murray, a widely published psychologist who is an expert in emotional health and optimal relationships; and Alicia Fortinberry, a psychotherapist, health writer and executive coach. The second is a very informative article in Medical News Today by Christian Nordqvist called “What is depression? What causes depression?” This is where I got most of the facts about the different forms of depression, as well as from my textbook, Psychology: A Journey by Dennis Coon and John O. Mitterer.

Depression is much more common than most people think. Because it is essentially an invisible illness and is largely in the mind, it is difficult to correctly diagnose it and most people suffer for months, years, or even decades with depression. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines depression as “a mood disorder marked especially by sadness, inactivity, difficulty with thinking and concentration, a significant increase or decrease in appetite and time spent sleeping, feelings of dejection and hopelessness, and sometimes suicidal thoughts or an attempt to commit suicide.” Most medical definitions are able to explain what happens and why it does, but after carefully examining this one, we only notice that it explains what happens, but not why. Usually, the symptoms of an illness are...

“Suicide and Depression”. All About Depression: Overview. All About Self Help, LLC. 5 June 2010. Web. 30 July 2010.

What is depression? Depression is an illness that can take over a person’s life---it can take their happiness and their will to live. This illness can effect adults, teenagers, and even kids. “Depression is an equal opportunity disorder---- it can affect anyone of any group, any background, any race, any gender, and any age. It is the great leveler of all groups and can take the greatest and the smallest of us all and reduce us to the pain and nothingness that is depression (Nydegger 1)”. Depression is an emotion most people may feel they have experienced, but little do they know it’s just the basic emotions we feel. It is important to identify the symptoms of depression, the types of depression, who can get them and how they manifest, in other to be able to treatment them.

Sadness is a sad feeling when it comes and goes, but feelings of depression doesn’t fade. In the book, “Depression the Mood Disease” Johns Hopkins claims, “Depression does not really mean sadness. Usually a person feels sad about something in particular, and the feeling is usually associated with some loss” (Hopkins 4). Sadness is a common human emotion because it can occur regularly in our everyday lives. Fundamentally, sadness doesn’t remain constant. Feelings of depression continues every minute of an individual’s daily life. In the article “Why Depression and Sadness are not the same” Margarita Tartakovsky states, “People with depression have described it as a black cloud following them everywhere they go. Some people describe feeling numb or empty. Some are utterly exhausted, so much so that getting out of bed is hard and walking to the mailbox feels like a workout.” I utterly agree with Tartakovsky because there’s no denial that people with depression tend to have low drive to keep up with their daily life. The “numb” or “empty” feelings is something that I believe we all kind of experience once in a while due to sadness, but people with depression feel this way every day. These negative feelings leads the person to make inappropriate actions. To deter them taking these kind of actions, doctors and psychiatrists are prescribing antidepressants and