Having close friends or family to talk to can help you maintain perspective on your issues and avoid having to deal with problems alone. Marital or relationship problems. While a network of strong and supportive relationships can be crucial to good mental health, troubled, unhappy, or abusive relationships can have the opposite effect and increase your risk for depression.
Recent stressful life experiences. Major life changes, such as a bereavement, divorce, unemployment , or financial problems can often bring overwhelming levels of stress and increase your risk of developing depression. Chronic illness or pain. Unmanaged pain or being diagnosed with a serious illness , such as cancer, heart disease, or diabetes, can trigger feelings of hopelessness and helplessness.
Family history of depression. Your lifestyle choices, relationships, and coping skills matter just as much as genetics.
Whether your personality traits are inherited from your parents or the result of life experiences, they can impact your risk of depression. For example, you may be at a greater risk if you tend to worry excessively , have a negative outlook on life, are highly self-critical, or suffer from low self-esteem.
Early childhood trauma or abuse. Early life stresses such as childhood trauma, abuse, or bullying can make you more susceptible to a number of future health conditions, including depression. Alcohol or drug abuse. Substance abuse can often co-occur with depression.
Many people use alcohol or drugs as a means of self-medicating their moods or cope with stress or difficult emotions. If you are already at risk, abusing alcohol or drugs may push you over the edge. There is also evidence that those who abuse opioid painkillers are at greater risk for depression. Understanding the underlying cause of your depression may help you overcome the problem.
For example, if you are feeling depressed because of a dead-end job, the best treatment might be finding a more satisfying career rather than simply taking an antidepressant. If you are new to an area and feeling lonely and sad, finding new friends will probably give you more of a mood boost than going to therapy.
In such cases, the depression is remedied by changing the situation. But there are many things you can do to lift and stabilize your mood. The key is to start with a few small goals and slowly build from there, trying to do a little more each day. Feeling better takes time, but you can get there by making positive choices for yourself.
Reach out to other people. The simple act of talking to someone face-to-face about how you feel can be an enormous help. Get moving. But regular exercise can be as effective as antidepressant medication in countering the symptoms of depression. Take a short walk or put some music on and dance around. Start with small activities and build up from there. Eat a mood boosting diet. Reduce your intake of foods that can adversely affect your mood, such as caffeine, alcohol, trans fats, sugar and refined carbs.
And increase mood-enhancing nutrients such as Omega-3 fatty acids. Find ways to engage again with the world. Symptoms of depression in men may also be different. An analysis in JAMA Psychiatry found that men were more likely than women to experience anger attacks, aggression, and risk-taking behavior as depression symptoms. Though it is commonly thought that women suffer from depression more frequently than men, the study suggests that men and women may both equally suffer from depression.
The differences in symptoms and what men report to their doctors may make depression harder to diagnose in men. Traditional symptoms of depression, such as sadness and crying, may be more frequently hidden or not reported by men. Those who are experiencing symptoms of depression should seek medical assistance.
A family doctor or mental health professional will discuss treatment options to help the person manage their depression and carry on with daily life. In times of crisis, a person should seek help from a hospital emergency department. Read the article in Spanish. A recent study examined how air pollutants impact brain networks to mediate changes in cognitive function and enhance the risk of depression.
A new study investigates whether or not regularly consuming mushrooms might reduce the risk of developing depression. The authors conclude that it…. New research compares rates of depression among adults in the United States before and after the pandemic and finds that COVID may have severely….
Depression's physical symptoms can include fatigue, appetite changes, sleeping more or less than usual, and pain. Sometimes people taking antidepressants feel better and then stop taking the medication on their own, and the depression returns. When you and your doctor have decided it is time to stop the medication, usually after a course of 6 to 12 months, the doctor will help you slowly and safely decrease your dose.
Stopping them abruptly can cause withdrawal symptoms. Please Note: In some cases, children, teenagers, and young adults under 25 may experience an increase in suicidal thoughts or behavior when taking antidepressants, especially in the first few weeks after starting or when the dose is changed.
This warning from the U. Food and Drug Administration FDA also says that patients of all ages taking antidepressants should be watched closely, especially during the first few weeks of treatment. If you are considering taking an antidepressant and you are pregnant, planning to become pregnant, or breastfeeding, talk to your doctor about any increased health risks to you or your unborn or nursing child. To find the latest information about antidepressants, talk to your doctor and visit www.
You may have heard about an herbal medicine called St. John's wort. Although it is a top-selling botanical product, the FDA has not approved its use as an over-the-counter or prescription medicine for depression, and there are serious concerns about its safety it should never be combined with a prescription antidepressant and effectiveness. Do not use St. Other natural products sold as dietary supplements, including omega-3 fatty acids and S-adenosylmethionine SAMe , remain under study but have not yet been proven safe and effective for routine use.
For more information on herbal and other complementary approaches and current research, please visit the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health website.
Examples of evidence-based approaches specific to the treatment of depression include cognitive-behavioral therapy CBT , interpersonal therapy IPT , and problem-solving therapy.
If medications do not reduce the symptoms of depression, electroconvulsive therapy ECT may be an option to explore. Based on the latest research:. Other more recently introduced types of brain stimulation therapies used to treat medicine-resistant depression include repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation rTMS and vagus nerve stimulation VNS.
Other types of brain stimulation treatments are under study. If you think you may have depression, start by making an appointment to see your doctor or health care provider.
This could be your primary care practitioner or a health provider who specializes in diagnosing and treating mental health conditions. Clinical trials are research studies that look at new ways to prevent, detect, or treat diseases and conditions. The goal of clinical trials is to determine if a new test or treatment works and is safe. Although individuals may benefit from being part of a clinical trial, participants should be aware that the primary purpose of a clinical trial is to gain new scientific knowledge so that others may be better helped in the future.
Researchers at NIMH and around the country conduct many studies with patients and healthy volunteers. We have new and better treatment options today because of what clinical trials uncovered years ago. Talk to your health care provider about clinical trials, their benefits and risks, and whether one is right for you. Unless otherwise specified, NIMH information and publications are in the public domain and available for use free of charge. Citation of the NIMH is appreciated.
Depression affects how people think, feel and act. Depression makes it more difficult to manage from day to day and interferes with study, work and relationships. A person may be depressed if for more than two weeks they have felt sad, down or miserable most of the time or have lost interest or pleasure in most of their usual activities, and have also experienced several of the signs and symptoms across at least three of the categories in the list below.
Equally, not every person who is experiencing depression will have all of these symptoms. Generally, depression does not result from a single event, but from a combination of biological, psychological, social and lifestyle factors.
Research suggests that continuing difficulties, such as long-term unemployment, living in an abusive or uncaring relationship, long-term isolation or loneliness or prolonged exposure to stress at work can increase the risk of depression.
Significant adverse life events, such as losing a job, going through a separation or divorce, or being diagnosed with a serious illness, may also trigger depression, particularly among people who are already at risk because of genetic, developmental or other personal factors.
Although there has been a lot of research in this complex area, there is still much that we do not know. Depression is not simply the result of a chemical imbalance, for example because a person has too much or not enough of a particular brain chemical. However, disturbances in normal chemical messaging processes between nerve cells in the brain are believed to contribute to depression. This is thought to be how medications work for depression.
Other medical treatments such as transcranial magnetic stimulation TMS and electroconvulsive therapy ECT may sometimes be recommended for people with severe depression who have not recovered with lifestyle change, social support, psychological therapy and medication. Depression is often not recognised and can go on for months or even years if left untreated.
There is no one proven way that people recover from depression. However, there is a range of effective treatments and health professionals who can help people on the road to recovery. There are also many things that people with depression can do for themselves to help them recover and stay well. There are different types of depression. The symptoms for each can range from relatively minor through to severe.
Major depression, or major depressive disorder is the technical term used by health professionals and researchers to describe the most common type of depression. Other terms sometimes used include unipolar depression or clinical depression. Melancholia is an older term for depression and is still sometimes used to describe a more severe form of depression with a strong biological basis, where many of the physical symptoms of depression are particularly evident.
For example, one of the major changes is that the person can be observed to move more slowly, or to be experiencing significant changes to their sleep pattern and appetite. A person with melancholia is also more likely to have a depressed mood that is characterised by complete loss of pleasure in everything or almost everything.
The symptoms of dysthymia sometimes called Persistent Depressive Disorder are similar to those of major depression, but are less severe and more persistent. A person has to have this milder depression for more than two years to be diagnosed with dysthymia. Sometimes, people with a depressive condition can lose touch with reality.
This can involve hallucinations seeing or hearing things that are not there or delusions false beliefs that are not shared by others , such as believing they are bad or evil, or that they are being watched or followed or that everyone is against them.
0コメント