Depression

Depression use to be the top mental health problem reported however, it has been surpassed by anxiety in recent years. Depression is different from having a bad day or a time a short time of feeling sad. There are sometimes where sadness is the appropriate emotion. However, depression is something that does not pass it is a deep and debilitating illness. People report the feeling of a black cloud always hovering above them. Winston Churchill referred to depression as a black dog. Depression and mental illness generally has suffered from social stigma and lack of understanding. This has improved over time with awareness raising campaigns being spreed across media. A number of well known celebrities talking about their own experience of depression and how they manage their depression.

Management of depression is very important having the approach that it is permanent for some people and will require ongoing, persistent and consistent treatment. These will often require the input of professionals who specialize in depression. It may include connection to support groups of peers who also experience depression. It may also require medication and monitoring of this medication and a combination of all these things. What we do know about depression is that regular physical exercise is helpful to improving depression. If you can take your black dog out for a walk every day for 20-30 minutes you may find a significant improvement.

Do not self diagnose depression. There are a number of illness that are like depression however, they are not depression. An couple of examples of these are vitamin D deficiency, Low Iron levels can also course symptoms similar to depression and also some thyroid conditions can be confused with depression. The symptoms of these include low mood, feeling tired all the time, inability to concentrate. Its always a good idea to eliminate these things first they are easily treated with medication and can be detected easily by blood test. I suffered from low function thyroid for many years and doctors attributed my weight gain, feeling tired and weeping with depression and treated me for depression unfortunately this made the thyroid symptoms worse. It wasn't until my step mother came for a visit and saw that my hair was falling out and that my sleepiness was not normal in that it was very difficult to rouse me that she insisted that I get my thyroid function and perpetuity function tested too that it was discovered that I had virtually no function in either gland. Had I been left untreated I would have slipped into a coma and died.  I can not stress the importance of ruling out any physiological causes for depression.

There are two kinds of depression one is situational that is a sad event happens and the other is chemical depression that is that something in your brain chemicals is a little different and requires adjustment. Neuroscience is discovering more and more about the brain and how it operates for instance recent discoveries into images of the brain show that a depressed person's brain is different from a person without depression. What we now know is that the brain has a degree of placidity which means we are able to change the make of our brains. Who knows in time we maybe able to discover which part of the brain is causing us to be depressed and then exercise our brains to change the structure of it so that depression isn't a problem for us anymore. There is certainly a lot of evidence to suggest that the brain is an adaptive organ.