The statistics of mental health disorders are alarming. In 2015, 300 million cases of depression were registered worldwide. Unfortunately, depression is also strongly linked to suicide, acts of self-harm and even crimes during episodes of acute psychosis. It is estimated that around 800,000 people commit suicide every year (WHO, 2017).
Males are more at risk of committing suicide than women, study finds. A study with over 5,000 participants concluded that there was a statistically significant link between serious suicide acts and the male gender (Freeman et al., 2017).
The clinical presentation of depression can vary from person to person. The usual symptoms reported by patients are:
Sometimes depression can present with psychotic symptoms, which clinicians refer to as psychotic depression. Symptoms of psychotic depression include:
Clinicians use either the ICD-10 or DSM-V criteria to confirm a diagnosis.
The current treatment regimen according to the severity of depression:
Keeping yourself active throughout the day can prevent you from ruminating. When your body is engaged physically, all your focus is brought to what you are doing at the current moment. Besides, exercise has been clinically proven to release the body’s happiness boosters known as endorphins.
(Klainin-Yobas et al., 2015).
Good sleep hygiene is of utmost importance to optimize the quality of your sleep. Sleep optimization strategies include:
A novel treatment based on a paper published in 2006 was recently approved by the FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 2020). This ketamine-based nasal spray is a major breakthrough in the treatment of resistant depression (Shouan and Grover, 2018). While most antidepressants target serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine, ketamine targets glutamate receptors. Glutamate might have been the missing piece of this puzzle the whole time. Esketamine is a fast-acting drug and thus, can lower the symptoms of depression within a few hours only as compared to the routinely used antidepressants which can take over 2 weeks to months to start working (Healthline, 2020).
A specific circuit is affected in depressive patients suffering from amotivation, researchers say. An experiment carried out by the researchers at the University of California has identified specific genes in the lateral habenula coding for the symptom of amotivation in depression. While this finding may still be in its infancy, it might in the future open the doors to novel antidepressants that are tailor-made to treat specific symptoms and thus, lead to a revolutionary patient-focused depression therapy rather than the current guesswork strategy (Cerniauskas et al., 2019).
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