About depression and its causes
Depression can be more of a low-grade chronic unhappiness with life, or it can be intense feelings of hopelessness and negative thoughts about yourself and your life.
There’s a mistaken belief that depression is a state of mind that you can control by thinking positively. Not so. It is an extremely complicated disorder that most likely results from a complex interplay of individual factors that can be biological, social, psychological and behavioural. Therefore, “thinking positively” won’t cut it.
Other damaging misconceptions about depression include: “depression is the same thing as sadness” and “depression will go away on its own.”
Sadness is a typical emotion that’s expected in situations of loss, change, or difficult life experiences. Depression is more than occasional sadness. Depression involves periods of hopelessness, lethargy, emptiness, helplessness, irritability, and problems focusing and concentrating.
Why you can’t seem to get better.
Clinical Depression is a long-term, relapsing condition with a tendency towards chronicity. When it goes untreated it can actually change the brain, making episodes worse or more frequent.
Every time a person gets depressed the connections in the brain between mood, thoughts, body, and behaviour get stronger — making it easier for depression to be triggered again.
In fact…
Each episode of depression increases the chances that the person will experience another episode by 16%
The power of the Subconscious Mind
Another reason that depression remains one of the most stubborn, treatment-resistant disorders is because 95 percent of our brain activity is unconscious. That means that the majority of the decisions we make, the actions we take, our emotions and behaviours, all depend on the 95 percent of brain activity that lies beyond conscious awareness.