People who are depressed are far more likely to have other chronic medical conditions, including cardiovascular disease, back problems, arthritis, diabetes, and high blood pressure, and to have worse outcomes. Untreated depression can even affect your immune response to some vaccines.
Untreated clinical depression is a serious problem. Untreated depression increases the chance of risky behaviors such as drug or alcohol addiction. It also can ruin relationships, cause problems at work, and make it difficult to overcome serious illnesses.
A depression not only makes a person feel sad and dejected – it can also damage the brain permanently, so the person has difficulties remembering and concentrating once the disease is over. Up to 20 percent of depression patients never make a full recovery.
Major depressive disorder (MDD)
MDD episodes can last between 6 and 18 months or longer. If you start treatment soon after you experience the first symptoms, you might be more likely to recover and prevent future episodes.
Major depressive disorder isn't something that eventually “passes.” While most people feel sad at times in their lives, major depression is when a person is in a depressed mood most of the day, nearly every day, for at least two weeks.
Persistent depressive disorder is a continuous, long-term form of depression. You may feel sad and empty, lose interest in daily activities and have trouble getting things done. You may also have low self-esteem, feel like a failure and feel hopeless.
Dendrites are cellular extensions found in the neurons, or nerve cells. This suggests that depression is not an irreversible neurodegenerative disorder. Instead, its impact on the brain may be reversible, and the brain can heal.
Usually, the depressive episode length ranges from six months to eight months, depending on the person. While some people may have depression that fades, others may struggle with depression on and off their whole life. Also, different types of depression go away with time and are more short-lived by nature.
Depression may cause the release of glucocorticoid in the brain, a type of steroid that can damage the hippocampus and other areas of the central nervous system. When this occurs, you may experience symptoms associated with neurocognitive disorder (dementia), such as memory loss.
Depression ranges in seriousness from mild, temporary episodes of sadness to severe, persistent depression. Clinical depression is the more-severe form of depression, also known as major depression or major depressive disorder.
Current evidence suggests that depression is linked to traits such as neuroticism/negative emotionality, extraversion/positive emotionality, and conscientiousness.
However, there is also a lot of research that shows that depression actively leads to a detrimental development of the frontal lobe, ultimately affecting your intelligence and lowering your IQ because you're simply too depressed to think straight, or can't complete certain cognitive tasks anymore.
High levels of cortisol have the opposite effect on the amygdala (area of the brain that governs emotions, impulsivity, emotional behavior, and motivation responsible for emotions) as the excessive release of cortisol due to depression causes the amygdala to become hyperactive and enlarged.
Without treatment, the consequences of mental illness for the individual and society are staggering. Untreated mental health conditions can result in unnecessary disability, unemployment, substance abuse, homelessness, inappropriate incarceration, and suicide, and poor quality of life.
Some of the physical effects include erratic sleep habits, loss of appetite (or increased appetite with atypical depression), constant fatigue, muscle aches, headaches, and back pain. It's easy to dismiss these symptoms as stemming from another condition, but they are often because of depression.
Interestingly, only 39.4% of respondents have indicated that they have had a formal diagnosis of depression and 60.6% have not. In contrast, 53% of participants have considered seeking help from a mental health professional while 47% have not considered such a course of action.
A number of studies have suggested that there is a link between depression and dementia. It now appears that individuals with long histories of clinical depression (particularly depression that goes untreated) have a greater risk for developing dementia.
Research suggests that depression doesn't spring from simply having too much or too little of certain brain chemicals. Rather, there are many possible causes of depression, including faulty mood regulation by the brain, genetic vulnerability, and stressful life events.
When Is It Time to Walk Away? In some cases, the decision to leave is obvious. If physical abuse is present to any degree, and especially if the individual fears for their own life or well-being or that of their children, it's important to leave as soon as possible. Safety is the number one priority.
The American Psychiatric Association (APA) defines a depressive episode as a period in one's life of at least two weeks, during which they exhibit the requisite symptoms of major depressive disorder (MDD). The symptoms of MDD are diverse, and include the following: Low mood. Sadness (more on that later).
Longitudinal research suggests that over the lifetime, at least 73% of individuals diagnosed with major depressive disorder will endure future episodes, while 90% of individuals with at least three previous episodes will endure more (Mueller et al., 1999; Hollon et al., 2006; Wojnarowski et al., 2018; Solomon et al., ...
The hippocampus, an area of the brain responsible for memory and emotion, shrinks in people with recurrent and poorly treated depression, a global study has found.