It also found that the most depressed regions are eastern Europe, and north Africa and the Middle East; and that, by country, the highest rate of years lost to disability for depression is in Afghanistan, and the lowest in Japan.
Things have improved since people with mental illness were believed to be possessed by the devil and cast out of their communities, or hanged as witches. He argues there is a part of the brain called the limbic system that acts like a thermostat, controlling various functions of the body — including mood — and restoring equilibrium after the normal ups and downs of life.
The limbic system is a circuit of nerves, transmitting signals to each other via two chemicals, serotonin and noradrenalin, of which people with depression have a deficit. According to this description, depressive illness is predominantly a physical, not mental, illness. Cantopher says that, when under stress, weak or lazy people give in quickly; strong people keep going, redouble their efforts, fight any pressure to give up and so push the limbic system to breaking point.
However, there is no scientific evidence to support this theory, as it is impossible to experiment on live brains. Other commonly agreed causes or triggers are past trauma or abuse; a genetic predisposition to depression, which may or may not be the same as a family history; life stresses, including financial problems or bereavement; chronic pain or illness; and taking drugs, including cannabis, ecstasy and heroin.
The subject of much debate, there is a school of thought that severe stress or certain illnesses can trigger an excessive response from the immune system, causing inflammation in the brain, which in turn causes depression. The WHO estimates that fewer than half of people with depression are receiving treatment.
Many more will be getting inadequate help, often focused on medication, with too little investment in talking therapies, which are regarded as a crucial ally. Among pharmacological treatments for depression, the most commonly prescribed antidepressants are selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors SSRIs which reduce the absorption of serotonin, increasing overall levels.
Her son killed himself when he was only I am part of that statistic. If you think someone you love is struggling with the symptoms of depression , anxiety , bipolar disorder , self-harm behaviors , gender identity issues or an eating disorder, call Discovery Mood today at Discovery Mood provides effective multi-faceted levels of care that range from intensive outpatient treatment to residential treatment and partial hospitalization for adolescents and teens.
Call now and speak with one of our highly trained admission specialists today. Or click on the link below for a FREE assessment or a virtual tour. All calls are completely FREE and completely confidential. This blog is for informational purposes only and should not be a substitute for medical advice.
These disorders are very complex, and this post does not take into account the unique circumstances for every individual. For specific questions about your health needs or that of a loved one, seek the help of a healthcare professional.
Consider these alarming figures: Every minutes a teen takes their own life. Suicide is the third-leading cause of death for young people ages 15 to About 20 percent of all teens experience depression before they reach adulthood.
Between 10 to 15 percent suffer from symptoms at any one time. Until recently, it was difficult to apply some of these techniques in datasets that had a large number of people or questions because they required a lot of computational power. Content validity: We might want to know whether the questionnaires were measuring depression at all. How would we be sure of this?
We could first think about which emotions and behaviors we associate with depression — sadness, tiredness, guilt, a loss of energy, and so on — and we could make sure that the questionnaires ask about all of these emotions.
For example, if someone is severely depressed, we might expect that they are also less sociable and that they perform poorly at work or school. We could test whether this is the case for people who scored high on a questionnaire for depression.
Do all the questions measure depression or are some measuring other concepts instead? For example, some people have phases of depression, but also have phases of mania at other times where they might feel highly irritable or excited. Some of these symptoms seem to be opposites of depression. So, these symptoms should be scored as part of separate concepts, such as a manic phase in bipolar disorder, if we wanted a scoring system with high internal consistency.
Inter-rater reliability: If multiple doctors could not come to agreement about how depressed patients were, despite using the same questionnaire, it would hardly be useful. It would make it very difficult to compare patients with each other, especially because many of them would only be seen by a single doctor before they received treatment. Fortunately, there are straightforward ways to test this: we could measure how consistent different doctors were at diagnosing the same patients.
For example, we might wonder if it is appropriate to simply add up the ratings across all the questions to get a total score. And we might wonder how the questions are related to each other. Latent class analysis: On the other side of the questions are the people who answer them. We might wonder if we can classify people who respond to the questionnaires into clusters based on how they respond.
How different are these clusters, and do they matter? Answering these questions is the aim of latent class analysis, which was developed in the middle of the 20th century. First of all, we know that some of the symptoms of depression are common in the population, even among those who do not suffer from depression.
You can see this in the chart below. It lists symptoms of depression and shows responses from the general US population. The questions come from the PHQ-9 the patient health questionnaire , which is a popular rating scale for depression that is used around the world and covers all the symptoms in the DSM diagnostic criteria for major depression.
This questionnaire asks people about how often they have experienced symptoms of depression in the last two weeks. Even though some symptoms are common, depression is complicated. What makes it complicated is not the prevalence of individual symptoms, but rather the differences in the combinations of symptoms that patients experience. On the horizontal bars, you can see which symptoms patients have. In this chart, symptoms are marked as present if people experienced them to a moderate or severe degree.
The first thing to notice in this chart is that patients can experience many combinations of symptoms. The second thing to notice is that the most widely reported combination is, in fact, no symptoms at all.
This gave them a total score that was high, and meant they would still be considered to have moderate or even severe depression.
Think about the way that depression questionnaires are scored: each item is rated on a scale and the ratings across all the scales are added together. If it was a feature, it would imply that when people are mildly depressed, they would probably only experience a few symptoms, such as those that are common, like insomnia. Meanwhile, when people are more severely depressed, they would be more likely to experience more symptoms, including ones that are uncommon, like self-blame and suicidal thoughts.
In the 20th century, statisticians such as Georg Rasch, Jane Loevinger and Robert J Mokken developed models that could be used to test this assumption. These models test whether people who have uncommon symptoms also have more symptoms overall.
They also test whether the scores assigned to each level are appropriate. Using this method, researchers have usually found that some symptoms are more likely to occur together.
If you knew where someone placed on this general dimension, you would be able to roughly predict which symptoms they had and how many symptoms they had. But their specific symptoms would still be informative and important to understand. Plenty of studies have used latent class analysis to understand whether there are subtypes of depression. But different studies have identified very different numbers of subtypes, which might be because they analyzed different sets of questions.
They feel like giving up. They pull away from people and drop out of activities, but this isolates them and makes them feel worse. Teens can face many difficulties they're ill-equipped to handle emotionally: divorce, learning disabilities, and abuse and neglect, to name a few.
By nature, they feel powerless against these situations, and the effects can remain with them well into adulthood. Even a teen who doesn't face any of these challenges can be depressed. An inherited tendency toward depression also can cause the problem. Depression runs in families, but not everyone with a depressed family member becomes depressed.
People with no family history of depression also can have depression. Besides life events and family history, other factors that play a role in causing depression include social environment, medical conditions, and negative thought patterns. For teens, a stressful home environment or neighborhood poverty and violence can lead to depression.
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