Depression hurts External affective signs of depressed mood also include a physical hunching or stooping, or putting the head in the hands, and an appearance of being physically subdued, and flatness of speech. Depression, or a depressed mood, may in everyday English refer to a state of melancholia, unhappiness or sadness, or to a relatively minor downturn in mood that may last only a few hours or days. The loss of a loved spouse, child, friend or relation, a physical illness or loss of lifestyle, tends to lead to feelings of depression. In a clinical setting, a depressed mood can be something a patient reports (a symptom), or something a clinician observes (a sign), or both. The term is generally not used in countries which instead use the ICD-10 system, but the diagnosis of depressive episode is very similar to an episode of major depression. Depression hurts. Cause of depression
Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are a family of antidepressant considered to be the current standard of drug treatment. Depression appears to have the effect of stopping a person in his tracks and forcing him to turn inwards and engage in a period of self reflection; it is a deeply introspective state. Freud noted the similarities between mourning and depression (then called melancholia) in a now famous paper entitled, "Mourning and Melancholia". "The catecholamine hypothesis of affective disorders: a review of supporting evidence". Cognitive behaviour therapy has been demonstrated in carefully controlled studies to be among the foremost of the recent wave of methods which achieve more rapid and lasting results than traditional "talk therapy" analysis. SSRIs are said to work by preventing the reabsorption of serotonin by the nerve cell, thus maintaining the levels the brain needs to function effectively, although two researchers recently demonstrated that this is a marketing technique rather than a scientific portrayal of how the drugs actually work. Depression hurts. It can be argued that depression and clinical depression is in fact the refusal of a person to heed the call to change from within his own mind. Depression in physiology and medicine refers to a lowering, in particular a reduction in a particular biological variable or the function of an an. For example, it is possible to refer to "depressed thyroid function" or to a depression of blood flow in a particular area. Other somatic expressions can be a sense of "dispirited", or "lagging" or being weighed down, and a heaviness in breathing, expressed as broken or despondent sighs. |