The Causes Of Depression

There is no single cause for depression as many people become depressed for many different reasons, many of which are due to different things that have happened in throughout their life. Sometimes depression may happen due to things that happened in the sufferer’s child hood but took time to fully take hold in the persons mind.

There is belief in the medical community that some people are genetically more vulnerable to suffering with depression than others, but these still needs an outside impact for depression to occur. The opinion is that the genetic vulnerability coupled with outside factors like stress can cause abnormal levels of serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine seems to link a patient to depression.

Possible causes of depression

Stress

This is not just the stress of everyday life, this is more likely due to long term raised stress levels because a partner may be leaving, the bereavement of a loved one, the loss of a job, financial worries, or the impact of an extremely stressful event in ones lifetime like kidnap or rape.

Personality

If someone is a pessimistic person who cannot handle stress very well or is very self-critical and doesn’t believe in himself or herself then they risk a higher possibility of becoming depressed.

Drug abuse

When talking about drug abuse, we are also talking about alcohol and cigarettes, not just illegal drug use. Drug abuse can be a huge contributing factor to causing depression.

Medication

Some strong medications used for physical medical issue like high blood pressure can cause depression when taken over long periods.

Hormonal imbalance

It has been researched and proved that women suffer with depression at a higher rate than men; this is because of hormonal factors that take a role in the progression of depression.

Birth

Some mothers feel a lot of distress during birth and in the early weeks of the newborn child’s life, this can cause depression that is difficult to manage.

Illness

Those who have become ill with a medical condition like heart disease, which can be debilitating or a condition causing the change in a person’s visual appearance like the loss of a limb can seriously affect a person and can cause depression.

Summary

Depression affects people of every age, it seems that it does not matter how old you are, depression still has the ability to take hold. As we know females are twice as likely to become depressed than males.

When a person becomes depressed they feel as if life is lost, many give up on everything and find it difficult to even get out of bed through out the day.

Depression not only affects the person suffering with it, it can also have a huge impact on family and friends around the patient as they also have to deal with the every day symptoms the sufferer has. Some family and friends will try and help by trying to “cheer” the patient up with thoughts and ideas on enjoyable things to do, the problem with depression is that the sufferer needs to see the depression and want to try and combat it themselves before anyone else can help.