Quotes About Depression

Very few scientists now defend the idea that depression is simply caused by low levels of serotonin, but the debate about whether chemical antidepressants work—for some other reason we don't fully understand—is still ongoing. There is no scientific consensus. Many distinguished scientists agree with Irving Kirsch; many agree with Peter Kramer.

Scientists measure the depth of someone's depression using something named the Hamilton scale, which was invented by a scientist named Max Hamilton in 1959. The Hamilton scale ranges from 0 (where you're skipping along merrily) to 51 (where you're jumping in front of trains). To give you a yardstick: you can get a six-point leap in your Hamilton score if you improve your sleeping patterns

Loneliness, he concluded, is causing a significant amount of the depression and anxiety in our society.

Depression and anxiety have three kinds of causes—biological, psychological, and social. They are all real, and none of these three can be described by something as crude as the idea of a chemical imbalance. The social and psychological causes have been ignored for a long time, even though it seems the biological causes don't even kick in without them. These causes aren't some kooky fringe theory, I would explain.

How could I still be depressed when I was taking antidepressants? I was doing everything right, and yet something was still wrong. Why?

In a world that thinks there's no such thing as society, the idea that our depression and anxiety have social causes will seem incomprehensible. It's like talking in ancient Aramaic to a twenty-first-century kid.

One study of depressed people in Norway found that a program like this moved people on average 4.5 points on the depression scale—more than double the effect of chemical antidepressants.

My desire for a solution that was private and personal - the psychological equivalent of a pill - was in fact a symptom of the mindset that had caused my depression and anxiety in the first place.

The stunning thing was that loneliness is not merely the result of depression," he told me. "Indeed—it leads to depression.

I had learned there is overwhelming evidence that depression, anxiety, and addiction are responses to deep social forces that are rising around us. For example: the less control you have over your work, the more likely you are to despair. Or to name another: as your society becomes more unequal, you are more likely to feel insecure and humiliated, and therefore more likely to become depressed or anxious.

I was beginning to think there was something significant about the fact that grief and depression have identical symptoms. Then one day, after interviewing several depressed people, I asked myself: What if depression is, in fact, a form of grief—for our own lives not being as they should? What if it is a form of grief for the connections we have lost, yet still need?

Ironically, learning that depression and anxiety are not caused by a chemical imbalance made me feel unbalanced. Somebody once told me1 that giving a person a story about why they are in pain is one of the most powerful things you can ever do. Taking away the story for your pain is just as powerful: I felt like I was on a rocky ship and somebody had taken away the railings.

forms of mental distress such as depression and anxiety have three kinds of cause: biological, psychological, and social.19 They are all real. This is known as the "bio-psycho-social model."20 It's simple. All three sets of factors are relevant, and to understand a person's depression and anxiety, you need to look at them all.

cruel optimism.' This is when you take a really big problem with deep causes in our culture - like obesity, or depression, or addiction - and you offer people, in upbeat language, a simplistic individual solution. It sounds optimistic, because you are telling them that the problem can be solved, and soon - but it is, in fact, cruel, because the solution you are offering is so limited, and so blind to the deeper causes, that for most people, it will fail.

The public was being told two clashing things. First, that the symptoms of depression are straightforwardly the result of a chemical imbalance in the brain that has to be fixed with drugs. Second, that somehow, and at the same time, there was one unique situation where all the symptoms of depression were, in fact, a response to something terrible happening in your life, and in that one unique case, a chemical imbalance is not the cause, and drugs are not the solution.

If you believe that your depression is due solely to a broken brain, you don't have to think about your life, or about what anyone might have done to you. The belief that it all comes down to biology protects you, in a way, for a while. If you absorb this different story, though, you have to think about those things. And that hurts.

I started to see depression and anxiety as like cover versions of the same song by different bands. Depression is a cover version by a downbeat emo band, and anxiety is a cover version by a screaming heavy metal group, but the underlying sheet music is the same. They're not identical, but they are twinned.

I was told by my doctor that I was suffering from both depression and acute anxiety. I had believed that those were separate problems, and that is how they were discussed for the thirteen years I received medical care for them. But I noticed something odd as I did my research. Everything that causes an increase in depression also causes an increase in anxiety, and the other way around. They rise and fall together.

Unhappiness and depression are totally different things. There is nothing more infuriating to a depressed person than to be told to cheer up, or to be offered jolly little solutions as if they were merely having a bad week. It feels like being told to cheer yourself up by going out dancing after you've broken both your legs.

And so, Irving says, the primary explanation for depression offered in our culture starts to fall apart. The idea you feel terrible because of a "chemical imbalance" was built on a series of mistakes and errors. It has come as close to being proved wrong, he told me, as you ever get in science. It's lying broken on the floor, like a neurochemical Humpty Dumpty with a very sad smile.

That doesn't mean all chemical antidepressants are bad: some credible scientists argue they give some temporary relief to a minority of users, and that shouldn't be dismissed. The false story is the claim that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain and that the primary solution for most people is a chemical antidepressant.

De todos modos, seguimos pensando que podemos curar la depresión por la vía conceptual. Yo lo veo más sencillo. Primero arreglemos lo fisiológico. Sal. Muévete».

The more unequal your society, the more prevalent all forms of mental illness are. Other social scientists then broke this down to look at depression specifically16—and found the higher the inequality, the higher the depression.

Curiously, it turned out emotional abuse was more likely12 to cause depression than any other kind of trauma—even sexual molestation. Being treated cruelly by your parents was the biggest driver of depression, out of all these categories.