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Severe Depression: Feeling Of Intense Sadness And Melancholia
People who are suffering from severe depression have more nerve cells in the part of the brain which would control emotions and studies seem to confirm these findings. Severe depression, which is also known as clinical depression, is a state where the patient feels intensely sad or melancholic or despairs to such a point that his or her social life becomes disrupted and his daily life is also adversely affected. Severe depression is a medical diagnosis and is not the same as one's everyday conception of depression. The occurrence of severe depression is thought to affect approximately 16% of the population at least once in their lives and in countries such as Australia, almost one fourth of women and one in six men will suffer depression.
Women Are Twice As Vulnerable As Men
It is also believed that women are twice as vulnerable to severe depression as men though there seems to be less of an imbalance over the recent past. This difference seems to occur in women in their 50s who have passed the end of menopause and severe depression is at present the leading cause of disability in the US and may become the second most leading cause of disability worldwide after heart disease by the year 2020, if the World Health Organization were to be believed.
Treating people with severe depression may require use of anti-depressant drug therapy which is found to be very effective and can benefit a vast majority of patients. The anti-depressant drug therapy should be given for a minimum of six to twelve months or even longer and it would not be in order to give a person with severe depression anti-depressant drug therapy without some form of repeated counseling as a support measure. Persons suffering from severe depression are highly prone to committing suicide and since the anti-depressant drug therapy may need weeks before taking effect on the patient, who is desperately in need of professional help for getting emotional support for the him or herself as well as for his or her family, should be taken under the care of a qualified medical practitioner before it gets too late.
The combined effect of antidepressants as well as antipsychotic drugs is thought to be promising and could be used for treating severe depression with psychotic conditions. Even though cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) in cases of severe depression has not completely been studied, trials of CBT indicate that it could be used in patients with depression whose symptoms do not respond well to antidepressants.
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