Causes of Depression

Whenever the word depression is mentioned, usual reaction of relatives of the sufferer is "Sir, he (or more usually she) has no family or other problems, in fact, there is no reason to be depressed". Such statements confirm that the public still think of depression as a reaction to stress, even though mental health professionals no longer subscribe to this view.
This view was strongly held by psychologists and psychiatrists earlier, but has been abandoned in the light of good evidence. It is quite reasonable to view depression as a reaction. But it is equally true that everyone who faces a crisis of similar nature does not get depressed. Now depression is viewed as a cluster of signs and symptoms mentioned in the earlier post, irrespective of the underlying causes. This helps in recognition of the condition uniformly, though disagreements can exist about the role of various factors - biological and psychosocial - in the causation.

The causes of depression are discussed under the usual headings - biological, psychological and social factors.

Biological factors include genetics, imbalance of neurotransmitters, medical conditions like thyroid, adrenal diseases and many other disorders. Female sex is in itself a significant risk factor as depression is three to four times more common among them. This again could be due to the effects of the female hormones.
Psychological factors include certain faulty views about external environment, maladaptive ways handling stressful situations. Social factors include poverty, unemployment and many others. As always the final common pathway for all these factors to operate is the brain's neurochemistry - the neurotransmitters engaged in inter neuronal communication.