Characteristics Of Depression

While the pervasiveness of depression in modern American Culture is apparent, the relationships between the factors that cause it are often debated. Depression, according to David Myers, is the most common disorder that causes patients to seek treatment and 17 percent of adults in the United States face depression at some point during their lifetime (Myers 621, 2013). According to the DSM-IV-Tr, as cited by Myers, a depressive episode occurs when someone shows five characteristics of depression for a period of two or more weeks. Characteristics of depression are a depressed mood for a majority of the day, diminished interest, weight loss or gain, insomnia or oversleeping, persistent lethargy, feeling of worthlessness, inappropriate guilt, difficulty

Social factors that cause depression are things such as early childhood abuse, low self-esteem, marital problems, and employment troubles, or, more generally, stressful events that are connected to failures in one’s work, marriage, and relationships. (Myers, 2013, page 623-624). Therefore, certain traumatic events or tribulations in each person’s life, a part of the social approach, are central to promoting depression and thus must be considered. Moreover, many people experience similar troubling events in their lives but respond differently with respect to whether or not they develop depression. This apparent difference is caused by two factors: biological and social. Frontal lobe activity, genetics, and the concentration of neurotransmitters determine whether you are more prone to depression whereas the experiences one confronts exacerbate this risk and often foster depressive episodes. Therefore, to fully understand psychological phenomena such as depression, one must contemplate the ways that social and biological factors

According to the reorganization notion of neuroplasticity, experiences and events can carve out new synaptic patterns in one’s brain, which alter brain function and in turn the biological factors that bring about depression. This suggests that social and biological factors of depression are intertwined and interdependent on one another. As a result, in order to understand complex psychological diseases such as depression, we must consider both social and biological factors concurrently and with equal