Why is depression the most effective mental illness and the most difficult to treat?

In fact, in clinical treatment,

Depression

It can be said that it is the most effective mental illness, but it is also the most difficult to treat. The scary part is that it is easy to recur repeatedly and indefinitely, and it slowly swallows up the determination and life of the patient to adhere to the treatment.

In recent years, the mental illness “depression” has almost become a “familiar” and the most common “fashionable” mental illness. The World Health Organization (WHO) even ranks it with cardiovascular disease and cancer as one of the three most prevalent human diseases in the next century that need health education and prevention. I do not know when the disease that will come to me is strongly imprinted on the hearts of the general public.

Depression has primary biological factors as well as secondary psychosocial and life events and other stressful situational factors.

No matter what the reason for its formation, once it quietly sticks to a person, it not only has strong adhesion, but also recoil and rebound force are often arrogant and domineering, and it is enough to make a person live in a short period of time. Confusion and heartache. Paradoxically, there are often no visible scars on the patient’s body.

That is to say, people around can’t understand why the person is in so much pain. Therefore, the most common sentence heard by patients with depression in clinical practice is: “It is impossible for anyone to be Know how much pain I am.”

Personal constitution is an important relapse factor

The real trouble is that while most first-episode depressive symptoms are often mild and easily overlooked, remission can be achieved with mental adjustment and distraction. Therefore, many depressed patients never thought that they would suffer from depression at first, and of course they would not have the opportunity to feel sick and receive treatment immediately.

As a result, depression began to lurk quietly, with more and more frequency, and slowly began to affect the patient’s study, work and daily life.

About 80% of mild depression will lead to relapsing major depression. When you feel stressed, or when you have no trouble at all, it will sweep your upper body again and again, causing You live in a long-term nightmare that you don’t know when it will devour your soul again, and the sense of unprovoked fear that recurs several times but cannot be avoided will of course seriously erode a person’s mental function and consume his stubbornly resistant personality state. . Therefore, relapsing major depression can be said to be one of the greatest disasters of mankind.

There is also such a consensus in psychiatry-depression is one of the nearly 30 major categories and 410 sub-categories of mental and psychological diseases, and it is recognized as the most curative category of diseases, but it is notorious for Yes, it is also a mental disorder with the highest relapse rate. Depressed patients often find it extremely difficult to accept the fact that most patients have difficulty establishing a true “sense of disease awareness” and thus lose the opportunity for continuous treatment. So the next depression, which is menacing, will render his colorful life into black and white like a splashed ink painting. This is not to underestimate a person’s ability to pursue health and resolve to adjust their mood, but because the “self-constant regulator” in their brain that controls emotional function has been malfunctioning.

So, you may have the opportunity to see the most determined, toughest people in the world who have worked so hard to get out of repeated bouts of depression to no avail – they motivated themselves Trying harder to adjust their mood, work a little more (or work less), take a vacation, pray, retire, or whatever else usually helps, won’t help, and the only thing they can do is accept Physician treatment.

Relapses of depression may result in the following problems:

1. The more recurrences, the greater the chance of recurrence.

2. The interval between each recurrence is getting shorter and shorter.

3. The quality of life is getting worse and worse.

4. Gradual loss of occupational, social and family life functions.

5. Worst response to antidepressant treatment.

To date, a large and sufficient amount of research evidence has accumulated to show that not only genetic disorders and genetic factors manipulate more than half of the causes of depression, making depression the most biologically The mental illness of transmission rate is also a kind of “brain disease” in mental illness, not just “psychological disease”, it has nothing to do with shame, let alone the worldly stigma of the person’s weak personality, weak will or maladaptation.

Due to these biological physical factors, patients with depression are easily induced, added, and progressively formed under the influence of environmental factors, life events, and social psychology. Many neurochemical, neuroendocrine, neurophysiological and neuroimmune functions are unbalanced, resulting in a lot of co-occurrence with depression, and also make the person more painful and lingering physical discomfort, severe insomnia, mental retardation and deterioration , as well as symptoms such as suicidal thoughts that do not want to live any longer, but make them terrified and inexplicable.

Continued treatment for prevention

In fact, since depression has a strong constitution and the resulting personality traits as its core disease mechanism, and is obviously increased by stress factors, it is conceivable that not only these physiological The factors are not optional and determined by the parties, and the external mechanism is highly unpredictable.

Therefore, accept your physical state, courageously seek treatment and learn how to live peacefully with it, plus complementary, supportive therapy through cognitive and evaluation changes and life-view adjustments , will reduce the possibility of relapse to a minimum, and the damage to the mental personality state will gradually disappear.

On the contrary, if you are still caught in the distorted cognition of “heart disease still needs medicine”, hide in a corner and lick your wounds, delay or refuse to seek medical treatment, you will never be able to relieve the basic symptoms and improve The physical constitution will not return to the original emotional balance, which will eventually lead to a greater chance of depression recurrence, and the mental personality state will also suffer the greatest wear and tear. This demon of depression not only causes second-degree harm to the client, but also causes the recurrence of depression.

If preventive work at all levels can be done well, it is the most ideal and precious thing to prevent the recurrence of this troublesome disease, including improving parent-child relationship and social chaos, enhancing self-esteem and self-confidence , as well as enhancing everyone’s stress coping and emotional management skills, and providing warm, loving supportive situations to high-risk groups with depression tendencies, but sometimes with uncertain or weak results.

Therefore, strengthen the mental health education of the whole people, continuously publicize relevant knowledge and information, and improve the differential diagnosis ability and professional treatment literacy of medical personnel at all levels for depression, so that the whole people can know about it. Depression is a “disease” that cannot be driven away by the efforts of one’s own will and the adjustment of life thoughts, but must be supplemented by treatment methods such as drug therapy, psychotherapy and cognitive behavioral therapy.

In addition, during the treatment of depression, you must not reduce the medication, stop the medication and interrupt the process of psychotherapy at will, so as to get out of its shadow and prevent it from becoming your own emotions. Terminator.