It literally becomes an internal battle that you have to defeat, because otherwise it will just take over your life. Luckily, there's treatment for this, like psychotherapy, antidepressant drugs and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).
Some people will recover after they've had any of the treatments, however it will depend on the patient. Some patients suffer from mild to moderate depression, while others suffer from a severe form of depression. The degree to how the treatment will work depends on the severity of the disorder. People who suffer from mild to moderate depression will get better with a placebo or an antidepressant drug and they don't necessarily need the therapy, but for those who suffer from severe depression will get better with the help of the medications and the therapy. With the elecroconvulsive therapy(ECT) there are two side effects, one being memory loss and the other serious drawback would be a high risk of relapsing into another episode of depression within a few months.
In my opinion i believe that therapy is the best treatment to take, although some antidepressant work while some are in fact just placebos. I think its all in our mind when it comes to the placebo drug, if after raking it for a while we believe that its working, that's because our mind is set to think that way, were bringing positivity into our thinking that's why it works.
Overall depression is a major disorder that we have to look out for within the ones we love because it can turn into something dangerous and sometimes its hard to get out of.
In the video above, the psychologist goes into more explicit detail about what depression is and how it starts to develop in the brain, he names some of the types of symptoms a person can get and what disorders can a person with depression end up getting.
great post Karla! and you are right people with depression need to be taken into consideration. If not it can spiral out of control and the person can turn suicidal or even become a danger to themselves or to the people around them. Many people though, do confuse the definition of depression. There is MDD and then there is just depression. The difference between them is obviously that MDD (major depressive behavior) is the one that needs to be treated with careful and cautious care. while just depression is kind of like a normality, could be caused by failing school, a break up, a death in the family or something but that could be looked at but not need any medication, just simple talking should do that trick. My mother suffers from depression, severe depression actually, but she refuses to get help, so she just ends up falling more into her depression. Even so, you can't FORCE someone to get help if they don't want to, unless they are endangering themselves or someone else then I think that's when people need to step in....but anyway...great post :)
ReplyDeletethank you and yeah people sometimes dont know the difference between depression and MDD. People have options but knowing the right information will always help. An interesting fact that i read was that younger people have a tendency to have a positive outcome after trying the placebo drug, that actually makes me think if there was depression there in the first place or was it just something that they thought they had but were sure about it.
DeleteI completely agree that therapy is the way to go. In Abnormal Psych, we learned that there's research that suggests that people who undergo therapy are ultimately better off than those who opt for drugs. I think the problem is that people see drugs as a quick fix for their problems and they don't want to go through therapy because it won't fix everything instantly.
ReplyDeleteAdditionally, I've heard that something like 80% of depression diagnoses are made by regular doctors with no experience diagnosing psychological disorders. Yet, somehow, they're allowed to prescribe drugs that treat them. That's pretty messed up, if you ask me. Like you said, depression is a serious condition, so I don't think we should be allowing people with no training in that area to diagnose it. That's just something that really bugs me. It happened to my mom. She went to the doctor for one thing, and then he asked her a short list of questions and decided that she had depression. Just like that. Thankfully, she knew better and told him she wasn't going to take any medication he prescribed and that was that. So, a word to the wise: don't accept a diagnosis of a psychological disorder from someone who has no training in psychology.