Depression, as a clinical type of emotional disorder, is a mental disorder characterized by significant and persistent low mood. Its main manifestations include low mood, slow thinking, and psychomotor inhibition as the basic features. Some depression patients have severe symptoms of anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and behaviors. Currently, depression has become the disease with the highest suicide rate in psychiatry.
Depressed patients experience prolonged low mood and melancholy, from initial gloominess to extreme sadness, feelings of inferiority, pain, pessimism, and despair, feeling like they are torturing themselves hopelessly every day, becoming negative, avoiding, and eventually even showing suicidal tendencies. Patients exhibit somatic symptoms such as chest tightness and shortness of breath. They only want to lie in bed every day without any desire to move. There is a clear sense of anxiety. In severe cases, auditory hallucinations, paranoid delusions, multiple personalities, and other symptoms of schizophrenia may occur.
Each episode of depression lasts for at least 2 weeks or more per year, and in some cases, even several years, with a tendency for most cases to recur.
Depression is the fourth largest disease in the world, but the prevention and treatment of depression in our country still face a situation of very low recognition. Hospitals at the prefectural level and above have a recognition rate of less than 20%, and less than 10% of patients receive relevant drug treatments. At the same time, the onset of depression and suicide incidents have started to show a trend towards younger age groups, including university, secondary school, and even elementary school students.
It is urgent to pay attention to the popularization, prevention, and treatment of depression. Fortunately, the prevention and treatment of depression have been included in the key focus of national mental health work.
The treatment of depressive episodes aims to achieve three goals: 1. Increase the clinical cure rate, minimize disability and suicide rates, and crucially eliminate clinical symptoms completely; 2. Improve the quality of life and restore social function; 3. Prevent relapse.
One of the most important means of treating depression is medication. Humans can never persuade a severely depressed patient not to commit suicide with words. Once anyone on earth falls into severe depression, they are already out of control, regardless of whether they are poor or wealthy, knowledgeable or ignorant. In the most severe state of depression, they will choose suicide without exception. Therefore, one of the best and most direct methods for depression patients is medication, using chemical means to regulate the emotional problems of patients, starting from the synapses of brain neurons, to make patients feel happy, content, and increase their resistance to stress, depression, and anxiety.
