The Depression Epidemic by Abigail Hill

Depression, or major depressive disorder, is a serious mental illness that affects the way you feel, think, or act in a negative way. Depression causes feelings of sadness and thoughts of death or suicide. It is currently a very common diagnosis and it can become a very serious illness for people to have to live with. It is important for people to be aware of the effect that depression can have on a person, because it could be anyone around you and you never know how your actions or words may affect someone.

The earliest written accounts of depression occurred in the second millennium B.C. in Mesopotamia. Back in those days, depression was seen as the cause of demonic possession, and there was no real way to deal with it medically as priests were usually the ones that the “possessed” were brought to. The thought that depression was caused by demonic possession and evil spirits was prominent in many cultures, such as the Ancient Greeks, Chinese, Romans, and Egyptians. The Greeks and Romans believed that the best way to best rid of depression was through activities like gymnastics, music, baths, and diet. During the Middle Ages depression was considered to be brought onto a person from the devil or witches. This way of thinking was the result of the way that mental illnesses were perceived under Christianity and other religions.

In 1895 a German psychiatrist became the first to distinguish manic depression as a separate illness from schizophrenia and then in 1917 Sigmund Freud wrote about his theory of how depression was a response to experiencing loss such as the death of a loved one, or the failure to achieve a certain goal in life. The 1950s were an important time in the advancement of the treatment of depression, because this decade was when doctors began to use drugs to help treat melancholia alongside the psychotherapy techniques that had been used previously. Depression today is seen as the cause of different social, biological, and psychological factors, and while there is still no cure for it, the methods of psychotherapy and drug treatments have advanced drastically compared to just a few decades ago. There are many new types of therapy including Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, or EMDR, which is a therapy that was typically used to treat PTSD but with recent discoveries it has been found to also help treat depression. Doctors and psychologists have still not found one specific cause of depression, but now they are more aware of just how many different factors in society can cause a person to suffer from it.

Suffering from depression can greatly affect your personal relationships, whether it be with a partner or with just your family members. People with depression often feel like they are a burden to the people in their lives and will do the best they can to hide their pain from others. They will pretend everything is okay when they are out with friends, but as soon as they are alone again their negative thoughts begin to take over. Because of this, their friends may start to feel like they are not wanted anymore or that the person no longer trusts them enough to open up and talk about their problems. This can lead to a strain in the relationship if it is not addressed and resolved and that may cause a falling out between the people involved. Another way that a relationship may be affected by depression is the person’s lack of desire to be around other people and that can lead to the person who is depressed becoming withdrawn and no longer wanting to hang out with the other people. Depression can cause a person to just want to stay inside all day and never leave the house, even to meant friends. That relationship may be negatively affected if the other person starts to feel like they are no longer fun to be around, which can also cause a problem for the people in that relationship.

I think that communities need to be more accepting of people with mental illnesses. Even though they are so commonly diagnosed today, there is still a stigma about people with depression and that affects the way that society perceives those people. There should be some standard to how people with depression are treated, as well as people with other mental illnesses. Society needs to be more educated and aware of what depression really is and why it is so common nowadays. The way that people with depression are treated needs to be changed, and this is especially true in schools and in workplaces. When most people find that out that someone they know has depression they start treating them differently. They think that people with depression are weird, or that something is wrong with them, even though it is not really something that the person can control. This can put a strain on work relationships or cause some kind of disconnect between certain people in a community.

I personally have major depression disorder and it is something I have been dealing with since I was a freshman in high school. I was bullied in middle school and in high school and I think that that is one of the main reasons that I have depression. I still feel like I cannot be one hundred percent honest with people around me whenever I feel down, because I do not want to be a burden to anyone. While I have taken anti-depressants before, they did nothing for me except make my symptoms much worse. Luckily this is not the case for everyone and drug treatments have been proven to be pretty effective in treating depression. Not every kind or drug treatment or psychotherapy will work for every person with depression and it really is not anything to be concerned about, because of the vast amount of different treatment methods that there are. In my experience I was treated like an outsider by the people who were aware that I had depression and I never really had a strong support system at school or anywhere but my house. For me depression is something that I have struggled with every day for years now, and I do not believe it is something that will be resolved any time in the near future.

Depression is a serious mental illness that cannot be taken lightly, and it is important that it be treated correctly. It is necessary for a person with depression to have a strong support system behind them and that the person have someone to rely on and that they can go to when they are in need. While there is no specific cause of depression, people need to be aware of all of the factors that may lead to someone suffering from it. There is also not a cure for it yet, but there are thousands of different medicines and therapies for a person with depression to use in order to try and help themselves get better.

  

Works Cited

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“What Is Depression?” What Is Depression?, www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/depression/what-is-depression.

Iliades, Chris. “Stats and Facts About Depression in America.” EverydayHealth.com, 23 Jan. 2013, www.everydayhealth.com/hs/major-depression/depression-statistics/.

Schimelpfening, Nancy, and Steven Gans. “When Were the Earliest Accounts of Depression?” Verywell Mind, www.verywellmind.com/who-discovered-depression-1066770.

“Eye Movement Therapy (EMDR) for Depression.” EverydayHealth.com, 3 May 2010, www.everydayhealth.com/depression/eye-movement-therapy-for-depression.aspx.

“NAMI.” Home, www.nami.org/Blogs/NAMI-Blog/September-2016/What-You-Need-to-Know-About-Smiling-Depression.”

"How Being Depressed Can Affect Your Relationships". Psychology Today, 2018, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201602/how-being-depressed-can-affect-your-relationships. Accessed 23 Oct 2018.