3 most common causes of Depression

**This is not medical or psychotherapeutic advice. This article is for educational purposes only***

As a practicing psychologist I work with folks regularly surrounding issues of depression. Depression is the most common and the most costly of the mental health disorders, and even if an individual does not have a primary diagnosis of Major Depression Disorder (MDD) it’s common that depression or depression-like symptoms accompany their primary diagnosis. For example, many individuals who have experienced trauma and/or grief also had depressive symptoms.

Many individuals think that depression is just feeling uncharacteristically sad, but Major Depression is actually a cluster of symptoms which can potentially be debilitating.

In order to meet criteria for a Major Depressive Disorder, you only have to have five of these nine criteria. To make matters more confusing, some of these criteria are a bit ambiguous. For example, sleep disturbance can include sleeping too little, not being able to sleep or having restless sleep, or it can include the opposite of sleeping too much. As a result two people can have the same diagnosis of depression but have two almost entirely different set of symptoms!

Knowing the symptoms help us to treat the symptoms in psychotherapy, however, more than merely diagnosis the symptoms, it’s important for us to keep in mind the potential causes of the disorder to begin with. If we can identify the cause, then we may be able to intervene in a way which we can stop the problem all together.

You might have heard that depression is a result of a “chemical imbalance in the brain”, while this is not entirely true, it does point to the fact…

Related posts:

Can executive presence be improved through coaching? How? One can certainly improve one’s executive presence through executive coaching. To put it simply, our executive presence is what people are…

I was recently involved in a bad auto accident and I find myself wondering what life lesson this had for me. That was a huge eye opener on life and that in a blink of an eye it could all be gone…just…

Social Media is one of the most powerful tools in the marketing sector today. It has created a platform and foundation that will allow all types of companies to share their creative work and get…