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Clinical Depression Informative Speech

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Depression is one of the most tragically misunderstood words in the English language. Why? The term has two very different meanings, depending on the context. Among clinicians, depression is shorthand for a debilitating syndrome - major depressive disorder - that robs people of their energy, their concentration, their memory, their restorative sleep; their ability to love and work and play. The mental disorder actually lights up the brain's pain circuitry, causing a state of suffering far worse that of any physical discomfort. As one of my friends told me, "if I could give up my right arm - literally, have it amputated - to escape the pain of depression forever, I would take that deal in a heartbeat." To make matters worse, depression is a …show more content…

That's where the tragic confusion arises. For when those suffering from depression confide their diagnosis to friends and family, they're often met with relative indifference, born of the assumption that the patient is afflicted with mere sadness - a condition from which they can quickly and easily recover. As a result, patients faced with depression are often encouraged to snap out of it. No one would dream of offering such cruel and ridiculous "advice" to someone diagnosed with cancer or heart disease; the input is equally inappropriate in the case of depression. According to the World Health Organization, depression is common worldwide, with an estimated 350 million people of all ages affected. Depression is twice as common in women than in men, and is the single most common women’s mental health problem (“Depression.”). Even though depression is extremely common, this mental illness is still …show more content…

It doesn't present only during times of corresponding darkness and uncertainty; it can't be exiled by times of relative joy or contentment. Depression can be impacted by events in the outside world but the thing about it is that it doesn't need to be. It's always there, at best surviving inside you like a dormant virus waiting patiently for its chance to flare up and take total control; at worst, totally in control, pulling you down into a thick murk you can't break free of no matter how hard you may struggle. Put simply, it doesn't matter how happy you should be, how awesome your life is, how successful you are, how many people look at you and think you're on top of the world and are understandably smiling through every second of it -- if you're depressed, there's a very good chance you're always depressed. Just because you can't see it at a given moment doesn't mean it’s not there. Depression is absolute. It's a loss of hope and an unwitting relinquishing of belief -- and it hurts like Hell, so much so that after a while the acceptance of the pain becomes matter-of-fact and second nature. A few years ago, one of my friends suggested, "shrinks really need to come up with a better name for this disease. Depression doesn't begin to describe what it's like, and the word is just way too confusing for people." I couldn't agree

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