Depression is not looked at as a serious illness but many people in America have it and therefore should be studied a lot more because it can lead to serious health issues and suicide. There are people that want to focus more on other health risks in America such as Heart Disease, Cancer, Kidney Renal failure etc. But this does not mean that we should limit less the studies on depression for it can be just as serious and it is destroying the lives of Americans.
One type of way depression is ruining the lives and families of America is because of suicide. In the year 2010 there was a total of 38,364 deaths that were caused by suicide leaving it to be ranked the 10th main cause of death in the United States. Although the the total number of deaths caused by heart disease was 597,689 in that same year. People must still put into consideration that the amount of attempts of suicide were 959,100. That is almost double of the causes of death by heart disease . No one chooses to have heart problems they either are genetically more prone on getting them or either get them by a lack of diet or exercise. Suicide on the other hand is considered to be more of a choice rather than being something that was already placed into your DNA. It may be true that the majority of people that attempt suicide do not usually go through it, but for the ones that do end up going through with it leave a much bigger scar into the lives of their loved ones.
From “Struggling To Understand Suicide” by Ron Rolheiser president of Oblate School of Theology he talks about a friend that he knew that attended a funeral of a man that committed suicide. He mentions that in the funeral the brother of the man that committed suicide gave his speech about how his brothers death was such a much more harder one, than one that is caused by a much more natural cause. But he compared his brothers suicide to a similarity of a cause of cancer. Although cancer and suicide are different he mentioned that suicide was more like an emotional cancer. Suicide a.k.a “emotional cancer” is similar to cancer because it can be dealt with almost in the same ways. Saying that people could actually be treated to take it away and possibly cure it, they could also be treated for it just so they could live the rest of their remaining life or that they could not be able to do much with it and eventually end up only dying from it because it is something that is either too strong to overcome. Describing that suicide gives a much darker hole to the feeling that comes from the person’s loved ones. The families can no longer think of the person the same way anymore that they are usually more less talked about into conversations in order to not create more depressing feeling. He closed his speech by saying that no one really knows why he choose to end his life but the only way to better find out ,would be to better understand suicide.
I could not agree more with the description of the mans speech. I aswell had a friend of mine commit suicide and my feelings and my reactions were almost the same as to the description of that same family from Ron Rolheiser’s article. Its a feeling that ‘s much further different from someone that passes away by a natural death. Everyone was in shock as to why he would have actually done it . People were aware that he was having relationship problems but this still made people question if there would have been a way to actually stop him from doing it. It is not as simple to just to stop a person from hurting themselves. Just because you may stop them from hurting themselves that one time doesn’t mean you will always be there to protect them. The fact of the matter was that my friend desperately needed help. But it wasn’t just medicine that he needed. It would have had to been help far greater than just medicine.
Another way depression is ruining the lives of Americans is that it is beginning to be more commonly found throughout the youth of america. This plays a very crucial role how the future of this country could be affected by it. A majority of people that suffer from depression are college students. It has been reported that there is up to thirty percent of college students get so depressed that they are not able to function properly. This is a very large chunk of the percentage of students that are enrolled into colleges. By being able to better treat and control depression it will let the college students be more focused and in turn give them a better outcome of their school.
These most recent years have been extremely hard for Americans especially since the economy has gone down so far. We have been reaching numbers of disemployment very similar to ones that from back of the days of the Great Depression. This type of situations have only been worsening the amounts of depression. People loosing their jobs and not making enough money for their families has been causing them to get even more depressed. It has been splitting families apart by causing the number of divorces in America to increase.
When divorces occur it ultimately leads to many different types of depression, not only towards one person but possibly to the whole family. From the “Journal of Health and Social Behavior” written by Ranae J. Evans and Robin W. Simon they conducted studies on how many percentage of people have depression or any other type of mental illness. Their test and studies performed were mostly done to many different age groups and also performed types of races which they believed to show a big difference from which ethnic groups have a higher depression rate than the other. Also in the “Statistics and the nature of Depression” written by G. Dunn, P. C. Sham and D. J. Hand they go through other types of studies that were conducted in the past that show how such a large percentage of people have it. Although the studies that are talked about in this article are very dated they still give almost the same percentage of people with depression. The only way to really solve this issues is to go beyond the studies that we conduct for depression and try to do more research on antidepressants or more natural medicines that will give us less harmful side effects.
There are many different types of medicines that are prescribed to help stop depression. The name of a couple of these medicines are Doxepin, Bupropion, Ariprazole, Citaploram, and Alprazolam otherwise known as Xanax and also to be known as the most widely used antidepressants. But with all these different types of antidepressants creates another problem. Many people become in desperate need for their antidepressants that they in turn get in a way addicted to the drug because they will feel that they cannot properly function without it. And in worse cases people may actually have an opposite effect on the drug entirely. These type of medications can cause a person to increase their thoughts on suicide, and feel very agitated. Sometimes it may not be the simple case on to having to just take a pill in order to control your depression.
We as Americans have had a bad habit at always looking at medicine to be the key to cure of all our diseases and illnesses. But when looking at other studies and different methods we can begin to see that depression can also be reduced by doing simple things. Exercising your body can in turn create some of the most similar types of chemicals that you get from medicine it will help reduce your stress and better control your depression. Exercising will also help improve your physical and mental health. For people wanting to do more research on heart disease and other health issues exercising would be a great way to help both people with depression and other deadly related health issues. Also being around people would help lower your depression by not making you feel alone sometimes all a person needs is just a little bit of companionship.
Although many of descriptions that have shown and proved to you help treat depression are ones that someone could almost clearly see it does not mean that we shouldn’t try study and do more research on other types of treatments of depression. Weather it be a form of physical, mental exercise or it being treated by an antidepressant there are numerous ways on how to help stop or treat depression. But it has to be pushed for us Americans to continue studying it more and more for it will always play a devastating and gloomy role in our culture.
