Edgar Allen Poe's Experience With Depression

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The poem A Dream Within a Dream written by Edgar Allen Poe has initiated my interest in the issue covered in this task. As someone who has had experience with depression for the past few years, I felt a strong connection to the theme of the poem as the emotions depicted through the experience of the narrator of Poe’s poem were quite relatable to my own experience with depression. This led me to the topic of depression. Although A Dream Within a Dream does not explicitly touch on the topic of depression, the feeling of having the important things in life slip away right in front of your eyes is one experienced by many who have had depression at some point in their lives. To investigate depression in society today, I have broken this task down …show more content…

Statistics NZ has done a 2013/14 survey on “proportions of people with high levels of psychological distress,” (Statistics New Zealand, 2014) which is defined as having a score of 12 or higher on the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale, a set of 10 questions which helps medical professionals to screen patients for serious mental illness; a score of 12 or higher indicates high/very high levels of psychological distress, which consequently leads to having a high probability of having an anxiety or depressive disorder. Participants of the survey were split up into four ethnic groups: Asian, European/other, Maori and Pacific. Out of these groups, the highest amount of people with high levels of psychological distress were of Pacific descent, followed by Maori, European/other and Asian. Another group observed was age, with the same statistics showing that the age group with the most amount of people with high levels of psychological distress were 45-54 years, followed closely by 15-24 years, 25-34 years, 35-44 years, 55-64 years, 65-74 years and 75+

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