Is Depression Caused by Nature or Nurture?

The general public believe that depression is caused by both nature and nurture factors. A majority of the public believed that nurture has a greater influence on whether the person gets depression or not.

Uni-polar depression is when a person is always in a very low mood which would last at least 2 weeks to be fully diagnosed with depression. A person who has unipolar depression usually do not see the positive side of things. Bipolar depression is when a person has sudden mood swings from really low mood to sudden high mood, bipolar depression is harder to diagnosis than unipolar depression. Depression is thought to involve many genes.

Biological psychologists believe that a person usually develop depression because of genetic factors. Family history is very important evidence for doctors to see when tying to diagnosis depression since the family history will show whether depression illness runs through the families that could have been inherited. Weissman found that around 50% children whose parents also expressed depressive symptoms develop depression too. This is a great number to inherit depression from therefore this shows that genetics plays a great role in developing depression.

Many twin studies have also shown results that genetically identical twins (MZ) have a greater number of inheriting depression than non-identical twins (DZ). For instance an experiment carried out by Prince in 1968 expected that MZ twins would have a higher concordance for depression compared to DZ twins. Results found were that the MZ twins who were raised in the same environment/family showed a concordance of 68% and DZ twins had a lower concordance of 28% for bipolar disorder only. This is evidence that genes plays a greater role than ...

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...d cortisol shows great differences in people with depression.

Advantages

There are many medications now that has evidence that the drugs work efficiently and successfully however there is also evidence that depression cannot be fully cured because sometimes if the correct amount of medication is not taken the depression can come back since antidepressants does not work on everyone.

There are many evidence (Wender, Weissman, McGuffin) supporting the fact that MZ twins who have the same genetics have a higher concordance of developing depression than DZ twins who have different genetics.

Disadvantages

Biologists ignore the fact that depression can be due to nurture for instance psychodynamic psychologists believe that people who develop depression could have had a bad childhood therefore the bad childhood experiences influences the adulthood of the person.