Mood Disorders

Mood Disorders

Mood disorders are quite interesting; especially if you're realizing that you have many of the symptoms. With mood disorders one experiences long periods of depression or elation, that causes ones everyday activities to be disrupted. The main mood disorders are major depression, and bipolar disorder. Another type of mood disorder is called seasonal affective disorder. This is caused by the lack of sunlight that people with the disorder receive in usually the winter months. Apparently the lack of sunlight disrupts their regular serotonin levels causing the depression. Phototherapy, which is daily doses of artificial sunlight, has been proven to help this disorder.

Major depression affects about 2 to 3 percent of men and 5 to 9 percent of women. Most of the time people are depressed after a personal loss, whether it be the loss of a loved one, or a daily failure. The frequency and intensity of depression can vary from person to person. Most of the time people with major depression show signs of helplessness, low self esteem, and despondency. Insomnia, loss of apitite, withdraw

from social habits, lack of personal grooming, and a lost interest in sex are some of the other symptoms of major depression. There are many different views on hat causes depression. On the biophysical view it has been found that this disorder can be linked to heredity, and these disorders do have a biological basis. These genetic factors apparently affect the choice of stressful environment we seek. Another view is that the loss of a parent, or even the rejection of a parent at a young age could ensure that this person will feel depressed anytime they suffer any kind of personal loss at a later time. Because the child doesn't want to express anger at that parent, the turn that emotion inward, turning that anger onto themselves, giving them a feeling of self loathing. This does seem like a valid argument, but this can't explain all cases of depression. Studies show that both depressed and non-depressed adult counld have suffered a loss of a parent early on in life equally. Peter Lewinsohn's reinforcement theory is another that has some very valid points. In this theory a person is caught in a cycle of depression. The person expels nothing but silence, no positive statements or gestures, and mainly says negative things, because of this trend, negative things seem to happen to them. People don't want to be around a downer, so the downer has a hard time making friends or maintaining any kind of relationship, and because of this they expel even more negativity because of how they feel when they get this negativity in return. This may seem like a childish metaphore, but if you shot a laser gun at a mirror it would come back and hurt you, making you angry so you shoot again and it hurts you, this keeps repeating until something drastic happens, in this case the person would probably turn the gun around and avoid the middle man. Another behavir related theory is called influential cognitive behavioral theory. Depressed people attribute the negative things in their lives into three kinds of factors, stable, internal, and global. Internal factors are characteristics of ones self, stable factors don't usually change, and global factors have to do with almos every area of ones life. An example used in class fits with this theory. If someone were to get a bad grade on a test, the non depressed person would blame it on the teacher or the test itself, where as the depressed person blames only themselves. In many cases, like this one, the depressed person may actually have the reality of the problem solved, but the non-depressed person goes about their day as if nothing were their fault, ignorance is bliss apparently. The cognative view of this disorder is basically the same. It states that people with depression tend to se things as always negative and never positive. These people may have more objective beliefs about themselves