As with any other mental health condition, comprehending what causes depression is crucial to managing and treating depressive symptoms. This starts with understanding that depressive disorders have no singular cause but a set of factors that are all involved in the development of depressive symptoms. With this in mind, the…
Depression Symptoms
Known more commonly and collectively as depression, depressive disorders are a set of closely related mental health conditions that affect a person’s mood, energy, nervous system, sleep cycles, biochemistry, and even brain waves. There’s little in an individual’s daily life that depressive disorders won’t affect—but other than a shared capacity…
Major depression disorder (MDD) is a mental health condition that impacts emotional well-being and can cause severe functional consequences in daily life. MDD is also called clinical depression, major depression, and unipolar depression (to distinguish it from bipolar depression caused by bipolar disorder). In Ancient Greece, depression was called melancholia,…
It’s normal to contemplate the state of the world and life itself; for some, though, these questions stir up intense emotions like distress and despair that last for months or sometimes years. While existential depression is not a formal diagnosis, it is sometimes used to describe these cases of depression…
While some of us simply despise the cold weather characteristic of winter, others actually suffer significantly from a form of depression called seasonal affective disorder or SAD. This particular type of depression is thought to be caused by a lack of sunlight; symptoms include feelings of despair, difficulty sleeping, and…