What is Depression?

This is just a sample from our e-book

Depression is a serious medical condition that affects the body, mood, and thoughts. It affects the way one eats and sleeps. It affects how one thinks about things, and one's self perception.

A depressive disorder is not the same as a passing blue mood. It is not a sign of personal weakness or a condition one can will or wish away. People with a depressive illness cannot merely “pull themselves together” and get better.

Without treatment, symptoms can last for weeks, months, or years. However, appropriate treatment, often involving medication and/or short term psychotherapy, can help most people who suffer from depression.

“I can remember it started with a loss of interest in basically everything that I like doing. I just didn’t feel like doing anything. I just felt like giving up. Sometimes I didn’t even want to get out of bed.”

-Rene Ruballo, Police Officer

Depression can strike anyone regardless of age, ethnic background, socioeconomic status, or gender; however, large scale research studies have found that depression is about twice as common in women as in men.1,2 In the United States, researchers estimate that in any given one year period, depressive illnesses affect 12 percent of women (more than 12 million women) and nearly 7 percent of men (more than six million men).

But important questions remain to be answered about the causes underlying this gender difference. We still do not know if depression is truly less common among men, or if men are just less likely than women to recognize, acknowledge, and seek help for depression.

In focus groups conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to assess depression awareness, men described their own symptoms of depression without realizing that they were depressed............................end of sample

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