A lot of medical research has contributed much to the understanding of depression. However, scientists do not know the exact reason that sets off depressive illness. There is no exact answer to the causes of depression but there are a lot of possibilities oftentimes resulting from a combination of things or factors. More than one possibility can be implicated at the same time, and probably no single cause gives rise to the illness.
Researchers still continue to investigate and piece the puzzle together. In the past, doctors supposed that causes of depression was the result of thoughts or emotions that were very troubling for an individual, but lately, experts realized that there can be quite a few factors working together that will cause a person to become depressed. Some of these include physiology, stress, learning, and thinking.
Physiology
One type of depression is “biological depression”, which means that there is a biochemical imbalance of some sort that causes the person to be depressed. It usually involves the brain and a range of neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are chemicals that aid different parts of the brain to communicate with each other. If these chemicals in the brain are low, then miscommunication can happen and depression may be the result. If the cause of depression is a biochemical factor, then medication may be needed to help overcome it. With medication, deep depression can be helped to “jump start” the recovery process so that the person can then do the other work of healing. A number of people but not all have significant biochemical component to their depression; other components are involved as well, generally.
Stress
Depression in people may be caused by experiencing overwhelming change and stress. Rapidly increasing changing and demands of adjustment in daily hectic lives are difficult, and too much adjustment in such a short time may overburden a person. All the stress starts to wear them out and results to a loss of resiliency. They no longer are able to bounce back from hardship, then they start to pull away from others and there is a decrease in energy which produces depression.
Learning
Another cause of depression is that people can learn to be depressed. They may have grown up in a family environment where everyone was depressed and think that these moods are normal. The same way that one would be angry if raised in an angry family; one learns to be depressed if the family was depressed. On the other hand, it may also be that the family was normal but busy. Parents may have taught a rule about life that they meant or not – that to get attention in the family, one must be in distress. This may be the first step in learning “depression life style” as an attention getting behavior.
Thinking
A lot of people think themselves into depression which may be one of the causes of depression. It is very easy to do because the only skill needed is “know how to worry”. Imagining what could go wrong, what might go wrong, and how awful it would be, then quite soon one can have created a problem in their imagination and intensified it by taking it for “the reality” where one develops a habit of negative thinking, leading down the road to depression.
These four pathways to causes of depression often act together, so if one experiences depression, these factors in life should be evaluated. Learning to have power over these pathways can give one the ability to control depression.
