Items Tagged With risk factors

Most people know the risk factors for illnesses such as heart disease or high blood pressure, but not many people realize that clinical depression has risk factors associated with it also. Having these risk factors doesn't mean you will suffer from depression, only that you may be predisposed to it. Below, in no particular order, are listed some of these risk factors.

• There is a history of mental illness in your family.
• You are a woman. One in four women suffers from depression at some point in her life.
• You were sexually abused as a child.
• Someone close to you is depressed (depression can be "contagious").
• You have a chronic illness or are in chronic pain.
• You lost a parent at an early age, either through death or abandonment.
• You have heart disease. One in five heart patients has severe depression.
• Someone close to you has recently died, or you are experiencing another stressful life event such as divorce or financial problems.
• You are taking a medication that has depression as a side-effect.

Related Links

• Grief and Loss
• GriefNet
• Who Becomes Depressed? - WebMD
• Lives of Women of Color Create Risk for Depression

I had untreated clinical depression starting from a young age. When I was finally diagnosed at age 27, I started trying to figure out why this had happened to me.

Why would a child suffer from depression? What are the factors that can combine to create depression in a young child? In many cases, one of the usual suspects is a family history of mental illness. But there was no such history on either side of my family. So I started looking for other explanations.

What I found was very interesting to me, as a few of the risk factors had been present in my life before my depression.

Read on

"People who don't know, who say it's self-indulgence, sound callous, but it's not callousness born of indifference; I think it's callousness born of ignorance. That kind of ignorance we've got to get rid of, and little by little I suppose, we will. You say to them, 'It's a pity you don't know. I'm sure that if you knew, I'm sure that if you knew, not only wouldn't you say that, you'd try to help in one way or another.'" - Mike Wallace, On the Edge of Darkness

Note:I wrote this a few years ago, and it has made its way around the Net uncredited. If you want to reprint it, please make sure you credit Wing of Madness.

What Depression Is:

• Depression is an illness, in the same way that diabetes or heart disease are illnesses.
• Depression is an illness that affects the entire body, not just the mind.
• Depression is an illness that one in five people will suffer during their lifetime.