Understanding Severe Depression And Its Treatment
People who are suffering from severe depression have
more nerve cells in the part of the brain which would control emotions
and studies seem to verify these findings. Severe depression, which is
also known as clinical depression, is a state where the patient feels
intensely sad or melancholic or despairs to such a point that his or her
social life becomes disrupted and his daily life is also adversely
affected. Severe depression is a medical diagnosis and is not the same
as one’s everyday conception of depression. The occurrence of severe
depression is thought to affect approximately 16% of the population at
least once in their lives and in countries such as Australia, almost one
fourth of women and one in six men will suffer depression.
It is also believed that women are twice as vulnerable to severe
depression as men though there seems to be less of an imbalance over the
recent past. This difference seems to occur in women in their 50s who
have passed the end of menopause and severe depression is at present the
leading cause of disability in the US and may become the second most
leading cause of disability worldwide after heart disease by the year
2020, if the World Health Organization were to be believed.
Treating people with severe depression may require use of
anti-depressant drug therapy which is found to be very effective and can
benefit a vast majority of patients. The anti-depressant drug therapy
should be given for a minimum of six to twelve months or even longer and
it would not be in order to give a person with severe depression
anti-depressant drug therapy without some form of repeated counseling as
a support measure. Persons suffering from severe depression are highly
prone to committing suicide and since the anti-depressant drug therapy
may need weeks before taking effect on the patient, who is desperately
in need of professional help for getting emotional support for the him
or herself as well as for his or her family, should be taken under the
care of a qualified medical practitioner before it gets too late.
The combined effect of antidepressants as well as antipsychotic drugs is
thought to be promising and could be used for treating severe depression
with psychotic conditions. Even though cognitive behavior therapy (CBT)
in cases of severe depression has not completely been studied, trials of
CBT indicate that it could be used in patients with depression whose
symptoms do not respond well to antidepressants.
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