Are There Risk Factors For Depression
While genetics is believed to confer some susceptibility, there is no single gene or set of genes implicated so far, it appears that a very large number of geneslikely modifiable by diet or behavioreach contributes a very tiny degree of vulnerability that could precipitate depression under conditions of stress. People can also be at risk of depression because of their personality attributes, particularly if they have a tendency to worry a lot, have low self-esteem, are perfectionists, are sensitive to personal criticism, or are self-critical and negative. Of the Big Five personality dimensions, the one most consistently associated with depression susceptibility is the trait of neuroticism. It denotes the degree to which the negative affect system is readily activated. People high in trait neuroticism are inclined to find experiences distressing, to worry, and to doubt themselves disproportionate to the circumstances they are in. In addition, studies indicate that women are at especially high risk for depression after divorce and men are at high risk following following financial, occupational, or legal problems.
What Are The Causes Of Depression Here Are 14 Surprising Triggers You Should Know About
Depression is one of the most common mental health conditions in the US. Its estimated that one in six people will experience depression at some point in their lives, according to the American Psychiatric Association. Depression might negatively affect the way you feel, think, and act. It can cause feelings of sadness, a loss of interest in activities you once enjoyed, or an inability to function at work and home.
Experts think multiple factors cause depression, including genes, changes in brain chemistry, personality, and environment. Many times, its a combination of two or more of these factors that bring on depression or make it worse. Going through trauma, grief, financial troubles, job loss, and major life transitions can also trigger depression. While those triggers might be more well-known, there are others that are less obvious. Here are some depression triggers to keep in mind.
Seasonal affective disorder is a type of depression that’s related to changes in seasons. SAD begins and ends at about the same times every year, typically lasting four to five months per year, the National Institute of Mental Health reports.
About 5% of people in the US have SAD, according to the American Psychiatric Association. While the disorder is most commonly associated with the winter season, some people do experience it during the warmer months.
What Causes Work Anxiety
There are so many aspects a job that can cause anxiety: having tight deadlines, trying to harmonize a work/life balance, dealing with office gossip and politics, meeting your supervisors expectations the list goes on. Thanks to all this, most people who work will experience some anxiety at some point.
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How Is Depression Related To Anxiety
Depression and anxiety are considered two faces of the same coin. Both involve brooding over experiencein depression, things that happened in the past in anxiety, things that might happen in the future. Depression is also thought to result from sustained anxiety. More than half of all people with major depression also suffer from persistent anxiety. The two conditions share many symptoms, including insomnia, difficulty concentrating, negative thinking, and loss of appetite. Many treatments that relieve depression also relieve anxiety.
What Causes Long Term Depression
Risk factors Having a first-degree relative with major depressive disorder or other depressive disorders. Traumatic or stressful life events, such as the loss of a loved one or financial problems. Personality traits that include negativity, such as low self-esteem and being too dependent, self-critical or pessimistic.
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What Are The Contributing Factors To Depression
There are many possible causes of depression. “It is believed that people may be predisposed to depression by a number of factors including changes in brain function, a family history of depression, have suffered stressful life events, adverse social determinants of health like poverty, or have other medical problems,” Dr. Pollack states.
If it’s the latter, theCDC reports, for instance, that “evidence shows that mental health disorderssuch as depression, anxiety, and PTSDcan develop after cardiac events, including heart failure, stroke, and heart attack.”
Things That May Cause Teenage Depression
Adolescence can be a very turbulent and difficult time, even for the well-adjusted teen. Depression strikes teenagers and adults alike, and can have far-reaching implications when young people suffer from emotional difficulties that they arent sure how to manage. After noticing the signs of depression it is important to get the help and treatment you need and to understand the root of your depression. This can help to make the situation more manageable for everyone involved. While this is by no means a comprehensive list of all causes of teen depression, these ten situations can be very common contributing factors to depression.
Talk to a mental health and referral specialist today to find a counselor or therapist in Ontario or call one of these help resources in your area.
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Causes And Risk Factors
Depression is not a mood you can just get over. It is a disease in which the brain ceases to register pleasurable activities, says Angelino. Indeed, MRI studies with depressed people have found changes in the parts of the brain that play a significant role in depression.
Women are about twice as likely as men to be diagnosed with depression. Youre also more likely to develop depression if you are between ages 45 and 64, nonwhite, or divorced, and if you never graduated high school, cant work or are unemployed, and dont have health insurance. Other risks for depression include factors such as these:
- Experiencing stressful events in your life, such as losing your job, having problems in your marriage, major health problems, and/or financial challenges.
- Having a bad childhood, such as one involving abuse, poor relationships with your parents, and/or your parents own marital problems.
- Certain personality traits, such as getting extremely upset when youre stressed.
- A family history of depression, which can increase your own risk three or four times.
Depression is far more common than you might think, with nearly one out of 10 adults depressed at any time, about half of them severely.
The 3 Leading Causes Of Depression
30 November, 2018
Depression is a well-known illness, with a large number of people suffering from it daily. This disease causes serious problems in ones daily life. Pessimism, lack of will to live and mood shifts are some of its main characteristics. Find out what the main causes behind depression are in this article.
Never confuse sadness with depression: one is temporary, while the other lasts a long time. But, why do so many people suffer from it? Is it genetic? Is it a matter of feelings or emotional sensitivity?
Lets look at the three leading causes that might help determine if you have suffered from depression.
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We Asked People Whats The Number One Cause Of Depression These Are Their Answers
Greetings & One Love, Crazy Baldhead
Greetings & Welcome Back, Most Honorable
This commenter suggests that a lack of this is the number one cause of depression. They make us feel lost and without any worth, perhaps even stagnant.
We Asked People, Whats The Number One Cause Of Depression, These Are Their Answers
Depression is one of the most common mental health conditions in the world. As of September 2021, WHO estimates that 280 million people suffer from depression: a whopping 3.8% of the global population. To make matters worse, the recent pandemic has caused a spike in the number of lives lost to depression or anxiety.
For a long time, depression was thought to be just a more serious type of sadness. But now we know it is a lot more than that. It is a serious medical condition that needs professional help. And a number of factors can cause it, most of which are very typical life experiences. So we took the chance to ask people what they thought is the reason behind this illness. Here are the peoples opinions on the causes behind this:
Early Losses And Trauma
Certain events can have lasting physical, as well as emotional, consequences. Researchers have found that early losses and emotional trauma may leave individuals more vulnerable to depression later in life.
Profound early losses, such as the death of a parent or the withdrawal of a loved one’s affection, may resonate throughout life, eventually expressing themselves as depression. When an individual is unaware of the wellspring of his or her illness, he or she can’t easily move past the depression. Moreover, unless the person gains a conscious understanding of the source of the condition, later losses or disappointments may trigger its return.
Traumas may also be indelibly etched on the psyche. A small but intriguing study in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that women who were abused physically or sexually as children had more extreme stress responses than women who had not been abused. The women had higher levels of the stress hormones ACTH and cortisol, and their hearts beat faster when they performed stressful tasks, such as working out mathematical equations or speaking in front of an audience.
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Economic Impact Of Depression
- Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide and is a major contributor to the overall global burden of disease.
- Neuropsychiatric disorders are the leading cause of disability in the U.S. with major depressive disorder being the most common
- Mental Health is the second leading workplace concern, following only family issues.
- Depression contributes to the estimated $100 billion annual cost of depression for U.S. employers, including $44 billion a year in lost productivity alone.
General Signs And Symptoms
Not everyone with depression will experience the same symptoms. Symptoms can vary in severity, how often they happen, and how long they last.
If you experience some of the following signs and of depression nearly every day for at least 2 weeks, you may be living with depression:
- feeling sad, anxious, or empty
- feeling hopeless, worthless, and pessimistic
- crying a lot
The symptoms of depression can be experienced differently among males, females, teens, and children.
Males may experience symptoms related to their:
- mood, such as anger, aggressiveness, irritability, anxiousness, or restlessness
- emotional well-being, such as feeling empty, sad, or hopeless
- behavior, such as loss of interest, no longer finding pleasure in favorite activities, feeling tired easily, thoughts of suicide, drinking excessively, using drugs, or engaging in high-risk activities
- sexual interest, such as reduced sexual desire or lack of sexual performance
- cognitive abilities, such as inability to concentrate, difficulty completing tasks, or delayed responses during conversations
- sleep patterns, such as insomnia, restless sleep, excessive sleepiness, or not sleeping through the night
- physical well-being, such as fatigue, pains, headache, or digestive problems
Females may experience symptoms related to their:
Children may experience
Common causes include:
You may successfully manage symptoms with one form of treatment, or you may find that a combination of treatments works best.
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What Does Depression Look Like
Well raise your question with a few Qs of our own: Are you female? Are you a teen? Depression can also affect different ages and genders in unique ways:
Women are more likely to ruminate . This can look like negative self-talk, sudden crying spells, feelings of guilt, or blaming oneself. Women are also more likely to have depression at the same time as an anxiety disorder, such as panic disorder, eating disorder, or obsessive-compulsive behavior.
Men with depression are more likely to show signs of irritability, anger, apathy, escapist behavior , or reckless behavior .
Younger people can struggle with depression and MDD . Children and teens may sometimes exhibit oversensitivity, social withdrawal, poor school performance, frequent physical complaints , or feelings of incompetence and despair .
Older adults and the elderly are often misdiagnosed or undertreated for depression because their symptoms can be mistaken for other disorders , or they may assume their feelings are just an inevitable part of aging. For many, sadness isnt the biggest indicator of depression instead, physical complaints are often the predominant symptom. Sleep trouble, low motivation, neglect of personal care or hygiene, and fixation on death are other signs of depression in older adults.
What Are The Symptoms Of Depression
Depression can affect your emotions, mind and body. Depression symptoms include:
- Feeling very sad, hopeless or worried.
- Not enjoying things that used to give you joy.
- Being easily irritated or frustrated.
- Eating too much or too little.
- Changes in how much you sleep.
- Having a difficult time concentrating or remembering things.
- Experiencing physical problems like headache, stomachache or sexual dysfunction.
- Thinking about hurting or killing yourself.
If you or someone you know has thoughts of hurting themselves, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800.273.8255. This national network of local crisis centers provides free, private emotional support to people in suicidal crisis or emotional distress 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
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Onset Of Depression More Complex Than A Brain Chemical Imbalance
It’s often said that depression results from a chemical imbalance, but that figure of speech doesn’t capture how complex the disease is. Research suggests that depression doesn’t spring from simply having too much or too little of certain brain chemicals. Rather, there are many possible causes of depression, including faulty mood regulation by the brain, genetic vulnerability, stressful life events, medications, and medical problems. It’s believed that several of these forces interact to bring on depression.
To be sure, chemicals are involved in this process, but it is not a simple matter of one chemical being too low and another too high. Rather, many chemicals are involved, working both inside and outside nerve cells. There are millions, even billions, of chemical reactions that make up the dynamic system that is responsible for your mood, perceptions, and how you experience life.
With this level of complexity, you can see how two people might have similar symptoms of depression, but the problem on the inside, and therefore what treatments will work best, may be entirely different.
What follows is an overview of the current understanding of the major factors believed to play a role in the causes of depression.
Genes’ Effect On Mood And Depression
Every part of your body, including your brain, is controlled by genes. Genes make proteins that are involved in biological processes. Throughout life, different genes turn on and off, so that in the best case they make the right proteins at the right time. But if the genes get it wrong, they can alter your biology in a way that results in your mood becoming unstable. In a person who is genetically vulnerable to depression, any stress can then push this system off balance.
Mood is affected by dozens of genes, and as our genetic endowments differ, so do our depressions. The hope is that as researchers pinpoint the genes involved in mood disorders and better understand their functions, depression treatment can become more individualized and more successful. Patients would receive the best medication for their type of depression.
Another goal of gene research, of course, is to understand how, exactly, biology makes certain people vulnerable to depression. For example, several genes influence the stress response, leaving us more or less likely to become depressed in response to trouble.
The evidence for other types of depression is more subtle, but it is real. A person who has a first-degree relative who suffered major depression has an increase in risk for the condition of 1.5% to 3% over normal.
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How Can I Help Someone With Depression
Helping someone with depression might not look a single way. However, things that you can do to help include encouraging treatment, listening with compassion, helping the person suffering with daily tasks, be vigilant for signs of suicidal behavior, and to make sure you are caring for yourself, too.
Who Is Affected By Depression
- Major depressive disorder affects approximately 17.3 million American adults, or about 7.1% of the U.S. population age 18 and older, in a given year.
- Major depressive disorder is more prevalent in women than in men. : 3095-105)
- 1.9 million children, 3 17, have diagnosed depression.
- Adults with a depressive disorder or symptoms have a 64 percent greater risk of developing coronary artery disease.
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How Stress Affects The Body
Stress can be defined as an automatic physical response to any stimulus that requires you to adjust to change. Every real or perceived threat to your body triggers a cascade of stress hormones that produces physiological changes. We all know the sensations: your heart pounds, muscles tense, breathing quickens, and beads of sweat appear. This is known as the stress response.
The stress response starts with a signal from the part of your brain known as the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus joins the pituitary gland and the adrenal glands to form a trio known as the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, which governs a multitude of hormonal activities in the body and may play a role in depression as well.
When a physical or emotional threat looms, the hypothalamus secretes corticotropin-releasing hormone , which has the job of rousing your body. Hormones are complex chemicals that carry messages to organs or groups of cells throughout the body and trigger certain responses. CRH follows a pathway to your pituitary gland, where it stimulates the secretion of adrenocorticotropic hormone , which pulses into your bloodstream. When ACTH reaches your adrenal glands, it prompts the release of cortisol.
The boost in cortisol readies your body to fight or flee. Your heart beats faster up to five times as quickly as normal and your blood pressure rises. Your breath quickens as your body takes in extra oxygen. Sharpened senses, such as sight and hearing, make you more alert.