What Are The Main Causes Of Depression?
Before treating bipolar disorder, it’s helpful to find out its root cause. Because often just identifying the main cause of any disorder is a big step towards figuring out how to address it.
Genetically Inherited
In 2006, a team scientists from around the world – led by Rockefeller University researchers – found a “depression gene” and named it “p11.” They found that this gene controls serotonin transmission in your brain. Serotonin is the primary neurotransmitter in your brain, you will be more apt to get depression if your serotonin levels are not at the optimum level.
But you should know that a bad p11 gene doesn’t mean you will be depressed. It just means that you will be more apt to get depression. The reason for this is that depression is a very complex disease with not only physical causes but psychological ones as well.
Let’s take a fictional character “Joan” as an example: Her p11 gene is bad, but she’s not depressed and never has been. But now – six months after the death of her husband, she still can’t get out of bed until 2pm, her home has not been cleaned for many weeks, and she hasn’t gotten out of the house to see friends or family. She’s not in mourning but clinically depressed. (Joan will probably respond well to a “Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor” like “Prozac.”)
It’s important to note that “Prozac” or any other anti-depression medication would not bring back the loved one. This is why it is important to treat depression on at least two fronts: Address the physical part of depression with medication and the mental part with therapy such as cognitive therapy with a trained therapist.
What’s another option to deal with this type of depression? Self help. Reading a step-by-step plan on overcoming depression. (More later…)
Anxiety From Stressful Event(s)
Even though your serotonin levels may be normal, a single stressful event (like in the above example) can make someone clinically depressed. And sometimes it’s a combination of events that can make some folks develop depression…
When I was just 16, I was so depressed that I tried to kill myself by driving my car as fast as it would go into trees lining a two-lane highway. (You will not believe I survived when you read my story.) But my suicide attempt was the culmination of a couple years of stress that included flunking school, getting in trouble with the law, girlfriend breaking up with me, and wrecking my car.
To survive something like that was an amazing series of incredibly lucky events–you’ve gotta read about it to really appreciate it. This marked a huge turning point in my life and I just knew I had to come up with a formula for beating depression ASAP.
It’s Rarely Just One Stressful Event
Using divorce as an example – even though divorce describes a single event, the divorcee goes thru multiple stressful events at the same time:
- Loss of companionship
- Financial security gives way to financial worry.
- No more nice house and car.
- Daily contact with your kids is no more.
- Being forced to move. (Moving–by itself–is one of the most stressful events a person can endure–forced or not.)
… There are probably other things, but you get the idea.
Taught To ‘Enjoy’ Depression
I know this sounds weird, but some people actually enjoy being depressed. Well, not exactly, but they really ‘get into’ the drama of emotional events. For these people, getting depressed is the equivalent of being extremely happy about something positive, only it’s the opposite; they feel the significance of the negative event justifies long-term sadness.
When in reality, they are embracing depression for two reasons: It enables them to escape daily responsibilities and it gets them the personal attention they crave from caretakers and friends (who would otherwise basically ignore them).
There’s one theory that holds they are “taught” to act this way at an early age:
If your parents rarely paid attention to you unless you cried, you learned that “the squeaky wheel gets the grease,” as the old saying goes; as long as you were in distress, people paid attention to you and comforted you.