I know that the idea in itself is depressing. After all, isn’t back to school time for fresh starts and new pencils and all that jazz? If you’re wondering what happened to the past summer’s happy kid and are concerned that your child, or a child you know is depressed, here’s my perspective.

I grew up with undiagnosed depression. It seems to have begun when my family moved to a town where a child’s social life and self-worth revolved around playing sports. I, as a bespectacled, uncoordinated bookworm, definitely did not fit in. I was the target of teasing and some physical bullying. In addition, I had undiagnosed ADD, which made certain aspects of schoolwork very difficult as well as causing me to lose focus pretty frequently. A few teachers appreciated my love of reading, but let’s face it – most teachers don’t like the geeky misfits any more than the kids do.

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Why is Sunday night the cruelest night of the whole week to a person with depression? You would think that all nights would be bad with depression, which is basically true. But I think, without a doubt, Sunday nights are the worst.

I remember that when I was depressed, Sunday nights seemed like the absolute pit of despair. They were even worse, in some ways, than Monday morning. The cause boiled down to one thing: escapism. If you work or go to school, weekends are, for the most part, the only time you can use escapism to, well, escape from depression.

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In a press release dated July 23, 2007, the law firm Morrison and Foerster, LLC filed a Veteran's Civil Rights Case alleging "‘shameful failures' by the U.S. Department of Veteran's Affairs and other government institutions to care for veterans who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan and are now suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)."[1] This is the first civil rights class action suit of its kind for veterans against the Department of Veteran's Affairs, associated veteran agencies, and the US Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales.

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Researchers who compared the way people with very severe depression responded to negative stimuli relative to a group of healthy controls found that the circuits involved in controlling emotions were disrupted in the depressed individuals.

"The neural circuits involved with regulating emotions may be damaged in people with this condition," said Tom Johnstone, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's School of Medicine and Public Health and lead author of the study published in the journal Neuroscience on Tuesday.

One of the hallmarks of depression is that people with the condition seem to be unable to pull themselves out of a funk or black mood.

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