Clinical depression a disease like any other
Clinical depression a disease like any other.Clinical Depression: a disease like any other.
Clinical depression is defined as "a mood or emotional state that is marked by sadness, inactivity and a reduced ability to enjoy life"(2:21). Depression is very different from the blues that people feel at one time or another. It is an illness, the same way that cancer or diabetes are illnesses. Depression affects the entire body and not just the mind. In most cases, it can be successfully treated.
This disease affects all ages, all races, all economic groups and both gender. Depression is one of the leading causes of alcoholism, drug abuse, other addictions and suicide.
Depression was diagnosed as far back as in the times of Hippocrates, an ancient Greek physician, who called the disease melancholia. He viewed it as an abnormal behavior which was caused by other diseases. Hippocrates recommended rest, exercise and a change in ones diet as treatment to this illness. Later, in the middle ages, this abnormal behavior was considered to be a result of demonic possession. It was treated with exorcism, flogging and torture to drive the evil spirits from the body.
It wasn't until the late 19th and early 20th centuries that physicians had a more scientific view on depression. Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer discovered that depression is a psychological and not a demonic force or organic abnormality.
Depression is caused by many factors. The loss of a loved one during childhood or other traumatic experiments (ie. abuse) can increase person's chances of developing depression later on in life. The number one cause of depression is stress. The everyday stresses in life can build up and cause a person to break down completely. Scientists have found that depression can be caused by "the defective regulations of release of one or more naturally occurring hormones in the brain (norepinephrine and serotonin)"(Nemroff, part 16 ). When these hormones are not regulated properly in the brain, it causes the depressed mood.
In recent years, scientists have found more & more evidence, through research, that depression may caused by a genetic defect and it may be hereditary. "Studies of identical twins (who are genetically indistinguishable) and fraternal twins (whose genes generally are no more alike than those of other pair siblings) also support an inherit component" (Peterson 1417). These studies have shown that depression is greater in a pair of identical twins than in fraternal twins.
Although studies on this theory look conclusive, geneticists are yet to find the exact
gene on which this disease can be located on.
In many cases, the cases, the cause of ones depression is very hard to pin point. The sufferer may have experienced something so traumatizing that the event may have been blocked off from their conscious memory. Different...
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