Let’s shatter a myth right at the beginning. Most depression sufferers I’ve worked with believe that they are the victims of a rare condition. Then I tell them the facts: Primary care physicians – in other words, family doctors – spend over half of their time treating depression. Pretty amazing. What this tells us is that depression occurs more often than any other illness. It is not just the most frequently occurring mental illness, but the most common illness – period.
Just think: If over half of the office visits to family doctors are related to depression, then tens of millions of persons are clinically depressed. And the majority of those who are depressed never even seek treatment. I doubt if we’ll ever know the true extent of the problem.
What are the reasons behind this “plague” of depression? Is genetics playing games with our psyche? Are the stresses of modern life finally catching up with us? Researchers tend to argue both sides. Genetics may, indeed, play a role. For instance, a tendency to be depressed runs in families. But does this mean that we’re born depressed, or instead, does a negative environment just get passed down from generation to generation?
This is the old problem in psychology of nature vs. nurture. That is, does nature give us certain ways of thinking and acting at birth? Or does our environment – that is, the way we’re “nurtured” – “train” us to develop these tendencies? As with most issues, the answer to depression, I think, is somewhere in the middle: It is part nature and part nurture. In fact, my depression research has led me to this conclusion:
ALL human beings are born with what you might call a depression “switch” that can be turned on and off. We may either remain relatively depression-free throughout our lives. Or, negative environmental influences, such as dysfunctional interactions with family members, traumatic events, guilt, worry, stressful job situations, and unproductive ways of thinking and behaving, can cause this depression switch to be turned on. The bottom line: Some people are more likely to become severely depressed than others. But – all of us have the potential for severe depression.