Depression is a terrible disease but treatable

Depression is a brain disease just like stroke, migraine headaches, Parkinson’s disease or Alzheimer’s disease.

Depression is very prevalent and is associated with suicide.  It is a horrible disease. To understand depression think of the worst day you ever felt in your life and imagine feeling like that every day, day after day and not knowing why. Think about what it is like to not being able to sleep, not being able to eat and not being able to enjoy pleasure of any kind. A depressed person feels he or she is a burden on the family and a burden on the society.

Common Symptoms of Depression

• Feeling sad and down in the dumps
• Trouble sleeping, both trouble falling asleep and staying asleep.
• Loss of appetite with weight loss
• Feeling worthless, hopeless and helpless
• Feeling slowed down and fatigued
• Loss of pleasure in life
• Guilt feeling
• Suicidal thoughts

Millions of people suffer in silence because of misconceptions and the stigma attached to depression and mental illness. The vast majority of patients with depression go untreated because of the failure to recognize that it is a real disease of the brain. No one volunteers to have depression. Who in the right mind would say I want to be depressed?

The causes of depression are a mix of genetic factors and environmental factors.

According to a famous study called “Global burden of disease “published by Harvard School of Public Health, WHO and World Bank, depression is the second major cause of disability worldwide in 2020 and will be the first major cause of disability by 2030. In a recent study done by LANCET a very popular international medical journal more than a third of Indian population suffers from clinical depression at any given time.

The good news is that depression is very much treatable and reversible so that the person enjoys life again.

Please contact us at American Center for Neuropsychiatry if you or your loved ones suffer from this terrible disease.

Our neuropsychiatrist Dr Kranthi Kiran has about 20 Years of expertise in treating depression and other psychiatric disorders; He trained in Chicago and practiced in the U.S.A for more than 20 years before his recent relocation to India.