One in five women and one in ten men will suffer from depression at some point in their life. People who are highly stressed or experience stress for long periods of time often report ‘feeling depressed’. Research released in the Lancet indicates that depression is more damaging to health than angina, arthritis, asthma and diabetes. Between 9 – 23% of the survey participants have had depression in addition to angina, arthritis, asthma or diabetes. The combination of diabetes and depression had the greatest negative impact.
A chronic illness is any illness lasting more than 12 weeks. 3.2% of those surveyed reported experiencing depression over a one-year period. The breakdown by illness was asthma (3.3%), arthritis (4.1%), angina (4.5%) and diabetes (2.0%). Depression also appears to impair the health of people suffering from other illnesses.
"Our main findings show that depression impairs health state to a substantially greater degree than the other diseases," said the lead author, Dr Moussavi. The study’s leader Somnath Chatterji (World Health Organisation) said, "what we are saying is, these people will also be depressed and if you don't manage the depression you can't improve a person's health because depression is actually making it worse."
The study asked participants to rank the impact depression has on their quality of life by asking questions about their ability to carry out everyday activities. Dr Moussavi, found that on a scale of 0-100 with 0 being the worst health and 100 being the best, people sufferering from depression had an average score of 72.9. A comparison to those who did not report suffering from depression showed a quality of life ranking of 80.3 for asthmatics, 79.6 for angina sufferers, 79.3 for arthritis sufferers and 78.9 for those with diabetes.
Some psychologists believe depression occurs in response to a feeling of loss. Could this feeling of loss be related to the onset of illness and a belief that good health has been lost and replaced by a future impacted by poor health? Knowing that it is common for people who are very stressed to experience anxiety and depression, it’s worth considering the impact of being diagnosed with a chronic illness such as angina or arthritis. The diagnosis may in itself be the stressful event that triggers depression.
In the year 2000 depression was the forth greatest “disease burden” (the impact a disease has on people’s health). This is expected to increase to second place by 2020.
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It has been medically proved that depression is much more common among the people who are above the age of 40. The matter to worry is that there are several diseases that attack a person above the age of 40, as for example, heart ailments, diabetes, erectile dysfunction etc. These diseases sometimes make it unfit for the antidepressants like xanax to be prescribed to the patients above this age group. Most of the antidepressants have side effects that make them unfit to be prescribed to the patients who are multiple medications.
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