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Depression & Mental Health FAQs
US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated 40 million Americans living today will suffer from major depressive illness during their lives. Seasonal affective disorder is major depression that appears in the fall or winter and goes away in spring, thought to be caused by lack of sunlight.
Postpartum depression occurs within four weeks of a women giving childbirth. Most new mothers suffer from some form of the �baby blues.� Postpartum depression, by contrast, is major depression, thought to be triggered by changes in hormonal flows associated with childbirth. Catatonic depression is a rare form of major depression characterized by (at least two): Stupor, excessive motor activity, extreme negativism, peculiarities in voluntary movement, and repetition of other people's words or actions. - mcmanweb.com
Psychotic depression is a rare form of depression characterized by delusions or hallucinations, such as believing you are someone you are not and hearing voices.
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, approximately 18.8 million American adults, or about 9.5 percent of the US population age 18 and older in a given year, have a depressive disorder. Depression is a chronic illness that exacts a significant toll on
America's health and productivity. It affects more than 21 million
American children and adults annually and is the leading cause of
disability in the United States for individuals ages 15 to 44.
Lost productive time among U.S. workers due to depression is estimated
to be in excess of $31 billion per year. Depression frequently
co-occurs with a variety of medical illnesses such as heart disease,
cancer, and chronic pain and is associated with poorer health status
and prognosis. It is also the principal cause of the 30,000 suicides
in the U.S. each year. In 2004, suicide was the 11 th leading cause of death in the United States, third among individuals 15-24.
According to the World Health Organization, depression is presently on track to becoming the world's second-most disabling disease (after heart disease) by the year 2020. Depression is responsible for some $87 billion a year in lost productivity in the US (a conservative estimate), and according to Bank One, is responsible for most lost work days in its employees after pregnancy and childbirth. Additionally, one million people worldwide die by their own hand, most as a result of a mood disorder. Finally, the linkage between depression and a host of physical illnesses makes it arguably the world's greatest killer.
Research presented at the 56th Annual Conference of the Canadian
Psychiatric Association shows a marked link between bipolar disorder
and migraines. The odds of migraine in persons with bipolar disorder were 40% higher than the general population. Data
obtained from 36,984 people aged 15 and over, who screened positive for
manic or depressive episodes with migraine, were compared against those
who screened positive for mania but who didn�t suffer from migraines. Amongst
males, 14.9% of those with manic episodes were also diagnosed with
migraines compared with 5.8% of the general population. Amongst
females, 34.7% had both migraines and bipolar disorder compared with
14.7% who only had migraines.unquote.gif While the research was
skewed towards persons who were already diagnosed with bipolar
disorders, what does it mean for people who suffer from migraines but
who may have an undiagnosed bipolar disorder?
Migraines and headaches aren�t fully understood but the manifestations are very real and debilitating for their sufferers: Throbbing pain Nausea Heightened sensitivity to light or sound Seeing dots, wavy lines, flashing lights, or blind spots Difficulty with speech, sensation, or movement
An estimated 2.1 million
American adolescents have experienced major depression within the last
year, according to a new comprehensive government study. Researchers
surveyed more than 67,000 young people ages 12 to 17 and found that one
in 12 had suffered from serious depression in the previous year.Nearly
13 percent of girls had struggled with depression, compared to less
than 5 percent of boys. Odds of depression increased with age -- just 4
percent of 12-year-olds experienced depression but that climbed to 11
percent for older teens.
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September 16, 2007 - Here is the question lurking behind the recent news of Owen Wilson’s suicide bid:
In a culture that encourages outing everything from incest to pedophilia, is depression the last stigma, the one remaining subject that dares not gossip its name? Does a disclosure about depression, especially from someone who seems to have it all, violate an unspoken code of silence — or, at the least, make us radically uncomfortable with its suggestion of a blithe public face masking a troubled inner life?
Most of us have experienced the everyday, transient blues — the emotions nibbling around the edges of depression (whether they manifest themselves as a sense of malaise, dejection or comic-tinged despair) that can be brought on by a shift in the weather or an unfortunate event. They may be chronic yet benign, the sort of moroseness that causes the narrator of Camus’s “Stranger” to stand around listlessly puffing on a cigarette. Sadness is probably more endemic to the human subtext than sanguine spirits, which is why funereal songs like Billie Holiday’s “Gloomy Sunday” strike a universal chord and why Freud conjectured that “ordinary unhappiness” (as opposed to what he called “hysterical misery”) was the best the talking cure could hope to achieve.
The romance of melancholy — a style of self-presentation marked by an appealing air of ennui — has been with us since Hamlet. It is perhaps best expressed in the opening of Chekhov’s “Seagull,” when Masha, asked why she always wears black, replies, “I am in mourning for my life.” But a poetic conception that tethers creativity to a despondent temperament is also misleading, discounting as it does how unproductively crippling the malady can be.
Depression — the real hard stuff — is not chic, and it doesn’t sell tickets. It is a clinical illness urgently requiring treatment, usually hit-or-miss medication that tinkers with serotonin or dopamine levels. I am referring to the sort of condition that subverts lives, making it difficult to talk to people and impossible to leave the house. At its worst, it can spiral into the sort of suicidal ideation that requires hospitalization, or into suicide.
From a young age, I have intermittently found myself in this painful, barren zone. Each time it occurs, I am struck by how paralyzing and isolating the experience is; it remains essentially impenetrable to people who can’t (or don’t care to) distinguish it from a random bad day. For all that it is acknowledged to be a disease afflicting millions — we are as much a Prozac Nation as a Fast Food Nation — depression remains culturally quarantined. The revelation that Wilson may be afflicted with a physiological vulnerability to the downward pull — to the sort of self-annihilating impulse best described in William Styron’s “Darkness Visible” — simultaneously fascinates us and causes us to avert our gaze.
Wilson, a 38-year-old light-as-air actor and sometime screenwriter, was a golden-haired member of the Frat Pack, the last person you would associate with a long, concealed history of this disease. He suggests that more familiar construction: a bachelor who ran in a fast crowd, used hard drugs and flipped when his romance with another movie star went sour. According to this scenario, Wilson slit his wrist because he spotted a candid of his ex, Kate Hudson, smooching a new man in a grocery store — as if life obligingly played itself out as a series of press-ready storyboards: Girl dumps boy. Girl moves on to new boy. Ex-boy tries to kill himself. Shoot and print. He becomes just another funny man harboring an inner sad sack — a “Tears of a Clown” syndrome — alongside Robin Williams and Richard Pryor.
However you parse Wilson’s desperate act, it is clear that in an instant-fix, cure-all culture — one in which we habitually reduce fraught real-life dramas into smart-alecky quips on late-night talk shows — we want instant-fix, cure-all answers. Addiction and recovery sagas are by now more boring than heartrending, but they go down smoothly and are media-pleasing. These versions of psychological mayhem sidestep the complex interior drama of self-destruction — Lindsay Lohan’s father visits her in rehab! — and thereby allow us off the hook. How much thought can you give to yet another celebrity who checks in and out of a $1,600-a-day rehab center as if it were Canyon Ranch?
Put it this way: It’s one thing for Wilson to draw upon his familiarity with “the black dog” (as Winston Churchill called it) in order to co-write “The Royal Tenenbaums,” a darkly funny movie about an unhappy family of grown-up child prodigies that includes a lovelorn sibling (played by Wilson’s own brother, Luke) who tries to kill himself. That’s entertainment, diverting in a poignant way. But it’s another thing to be the guy with everything who tries to take his own life. That’s threatening, suggesting a failure of will that might prove contagious — or worse, capsize box-office investment.
People who want to end it all have lost the necessary illusions that make life bearable; the sources of their pain are impossible to pinpoint but all the same infect the air they breathe. The defining tragedy of severe depression is that it comes without an objective correlative like a white plaster cast. This makes it easy to mistake those who suffer from this disorder for people who, with a little coaxing — a dinner with friends or a distracting movie like “Wedding Crashers” (starring, Lord help us, Owen Wilson) — might bounce back the following day.
Perhaps this is what makes depression dangerous to scrutinize too closely. If we don’t keep it at arm’s length, it might implicate us in a way that the coked-up antics of the Rehab Gang fail to. Which is why it is all the more important that when it ravages those who seem as if they should be riding high, it isn’t spun merely as a side effect of addiction or heartbreak. It is an illness that deserves to be given its due, uneasy as it may make us.
By DAPHNE MERKIN
Daphne Merkin, a contributing writer for the magazine, is working on a memoir about depression.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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Depression & Mental Health FAQs 2
What is Clinical Depression? Clinical
depression can affect your body, mood, thoughts, and behavior. It can
change your eating habits, how you feel and think about things, your
ability to work and study, and how you interact with people. Clinical
depression is not a passing mood, a sign of personal weakness or a
condition that can be willed away. Clinically depressed people cannot
"pull themselves together" and get better. Depression can be
successfully treated by a mental health professional or certain health
care providers. With the right treatment, 80 percent of those who seek
help get better. And many people begin to feel better in just a few
weeks.
Depression a Big Factor in Poor Health World Health Organization Finds Depression Often Goes Untreated By Salynn Boyles WebMD Medical News Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD Sept.
6, 2007 -- Depression has a greater impact on overall health than
arthritis, diabetes, angina, and asthma, but it all too often goes
unrecognized and untreated, a report from the World Health Organization
(WHO) suggests. more... Depression a Big Factor in Poor Health
For Additional Information About Depression Write To: The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)6001 Executive Boulevard, Room 8184, MSC 9663 Bethesda, MD 20892-9663
For free brochures on depression and its treatment call: 1-800-421-4211. or visit: http://www.nimh.nih.gov
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