How Does Depression Start and What are Its negative Effects
It is common in human
nature to react to bad things happening i their lives by becoming sad, and of
course this sadness can be profound which results in grief, lesser failure
which leads to process called “reactive depression “in relation to this “clinical
depression” is described a condition in which people feel extremely depressed.
The characteristic symptoms of this kind of depression are: fatigue, headache,
loss of sex drive, appetite changes, and waking early in the morning but not
being able to get back to sleep. In clinical depression a person becomes locked
into distinctively vicious cycle of negative thinking and hopelessness,
especially about themselves, well in some cases people feel reactively depressed
at some point in their life when something goes wrong , they are still able to
articulate exactly why they are sad .
There is another kind of depression called “teenage sadness”
they go through lots of mood swings. This mood changes takes place in second
decade of life when the outside world becomes more horrible during adolescence,
also the bodily changes at puberty brings changes in teenager’s behavior. Teenage
sadness is such a distinctive and profound thing that it must result from
changes taking place within the brain itself. Teenage mood alters as the
teenage brain alters. Many normal teenagers exhibit symptoms that would be
considered evidence of mental illness in adult .thus teenagers are good
ammunition for those who claim that no one can ever be psychologically “normal”.
Symptoms of Depressed teenagers: Depressed teenagers are
often irritable, whereas depressed adults are usually melancholy. Also adolescence
is a time of characteristically dramatic mood swings for reason which may
relate to anatomical reorganization of brain circuit controlling emotion. Due
to this teenage sadness is often expressed loudly for the world to hear. It
shows strong links to anxiety, suicide, drug use, eating disorders,
promiscuity, teenage pregnancy and failure at school, signs of anxiety
disorders thus depressed teenagers miss out so many things that they have to do
and this depression very often continues long into adulthood. The social
consequence of teenage depression is that sufferers can appear to become
inward-looking to the point of selfishness and other teenagers can find it hard
to sympathize with them .Negativity is a thread which runs through depression. We
must learn to deal with bad things happening to us, often by putting them in
perspective so we can bypass them in some way. People with depression focus on
adverse events, and indeed their memory for positive events is measurably impaired.
They react to these events with negative emotions. Teenagers with depression
often draw unreasonably negative inferences about events. They think they are
hopeless, and they find it difficult to escape from this thought. The worst of
all is they interpret adverse events as a sign of their own inadequacy and
weakness. If we believe that everything bad happens because you are incurably
worthless, then it is hard to see way out .
Depressed people often think in all-or-nothing way, in which
phenomena are either “good” or “bad”, which reinforces a sense of hopelessness
when so many things fall into the “bad” category. It involves tendencies to
jump to conclusions and over-generalize depressed teenagers often think that
happiness comes from material possessions and social acceptance, whereas other
teenagers are more likely to value their
own attitudes and goals .
If we want to stop teenagers entering life long struggle
with depression, we must first work out why depression so often start at this
particular phase of human life-plan. The answer to this is teenage body
undergoes many unnerving and distressing changes during puberty, and this leads
to teenage depression. The body is unstoppably and very publicly becoming
sexualised in ways that can be embarrassing and occasionally disfiguring.
Adolescence is a time when glandular fever and post-viral fatigue syndromes
often take hold. These may cause depression directly or indirectly by depriving
teenagers of contact with their developing social world. Depression is built
into the fabric of growing up. Depression like most mental illness is an
abnormal functioning of the mental abilities that define us as human. As we acquire
most of those human abilities ring adolescence, depression starts when they
reach teenage years. Teenage depression exposes a frightening instability in
the human mind.
Self Esteem is another cause of teenage depression, as
teenagers worry so much about how other see them, it is easy to understand why
early symptoms of depression can weaken their self confidence so much that
their self esteem falls even more. Social failure reduces self-esteem which
breeds yet more social failure and the cycle is complete .The teenagers
must develop its self-esteem And learn
to articulate its emotions and cope with adversity, all at a time when the very
fabric of the brain is being rebuilt this psychological development is
essential to becoming fully human, but it even exposes brain to own failing
,reason why depression start during adolescence is that this is the first time
when the brain has sufficient cognitive
abilities to be able to suffer it .
We have already mentioned about “clinical depression ‘and
the effect of this depression is that it even causes suicide, because an individual’s
suicide has been argued to be evolutionary desirable if it frees resources
from its surviving kin. Clinical depression is often effectively treated by
drugs called” selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors “these drugs increase the
amount of the neurotransmitter serotonin available in the brain and their
effectiveness has been claimed quite reasonably , to suggest that something is
wrong with the brains serotonin system during depression. Abnormal serotonin is
the actual cause of depression. Thus the medicine mentioned above helps to
remove much of the stigma of depression. The brain reacts to these drugs with a
complex rebalancing of its neurotransmitter system, and maybe it is this
rebalancing which “cures” depression. Well it will be wrong to say that just
because this drugs work to cure depression but it does not ea that it strikes
very root of the disease, and Thus it is ourselves which can cure this depression
problem, even we have control in our mind and think everything positively and don’t
take life seriously then we are out of depression.
