Rhyn Posted January 7, 2018 Report Share Posted January 7, 2018 Depression can affect everyone- 87% of people who hate their jobs have a higher risk of being depressed. Scary title, yeah but I need your attention on this. Mental health is an often overlooked issue and it's time to educate and understand a little bit more on the possible causes of depression, and maybe even a cure. That being said, it is not an easy task to determine if someone is really depressed- not the temporary bouts of sadness, fatigue or lethargy, or the lack of serotonin, a puzzle piece of how your brain works that governs your mood. Psychiatrists thought that anti-depressants like Prozac might help- but the truth and fact is, it only works temporarily. It isn't a cure, but rather it is a temporary blockage to a more insidious problem. Take for example, the 87% of people that have a high risk of depression from jobs that hate being in. There is a correlation between work life and personal health- physical or mental. By being in control of your work, you have less likely to have any mental health issues. Quote What he wanted to know, at first, was: who’s more likely to have a stress-related heart attack – the big boss at the top, or somebody below him? Everybody told him: you’re wasting your time. Obviously, the boss is going to be more stressed because he’s got more responsibility. But when Marmot published his results, he revealed the truth to be the exact opposite. The lower an employee ranked in the hierarchy, the higher their stress levels and likelihood of having a heart attack. Now he wanted to know: why? While this example is limited to work, we can use this model to examine any kinds of relationships with some modifications. Take, for example, family life. A conservative parent might always forbid the child to do something that isn't safe or is wrong, one way or another. The child is stifled and controlled- he or she grows up with subconscious limitations set on them that prohibits them from making proper choices, because they have developed a mental barrier that is created by. Sigmund Freud (while a bit shady, I know) posits that whatever happens in your childhood does affect your life on a whole [I would've included a source here but I do not have the text in question]. And that is just one of many examples. So it comes down to this: why is this important? Because a lot of society might be depressed without realising they are in Singapore. Mental health is still stigmatised, or even misrepresented because of lack of education and understanding. While the DSM might state that if you exhibit 5 of the symptoms (like low mood) over a sustained period of time, you can be diagnosed as depressed- people do not know this and the access to these information is limited. It's not like an influenza or dengue fever- where symptoms are physical, apparent and easily check-marked off a list. Depression, and mental health requires us to look at ourselves, something not many people are comfortable with because of self-esteem or even because we aren't told enough to care for ourselves. What can we do about this? Well, for starters Quote He asked them to explain, and they told him about a rice farmer they knew whose left leg was blown off by a landmine. He was fitted with a new limb, but he felt constantly anxious about the future, and was filled with despair. The doctors sat with him, and talked through his troubles. They realised that even with his new artificial limb, his old job—working in the rice paddies—was leaving him constantly stressed and in physical pain, and that was making him want to just stop living. So they had an idea. They believed that if he became a dairy farmer, he could live differently. So they bought him a cow. In the months and years that followed, his life changed. His depression—which had been profound—went away. “You see, doctor,” they told him, the cow was an “antidepressant”. To them, finding an antidepressant didn’t mean finding a way to change your brain chemistry. It meant finding a way to solve the problem that was causing the depression in the first place. Some of these solutions are things we can do as individuals, in our private lives. Some require bigger social shifts, which we can only achieve together, as citizens. But all of them require us to change our understanding of what depression and anxiety really are. To wrap this up, all I can say is that whether you're straight or LGBTQ+, if you think you have any mental health issues, get help and get checked whenever possible. IMH has a list of common mental health issues, what makes them "depression" or "anxiety", and how to cope. https://www.imh.com.sg/wellness/page.aspx?id=554 This list of LGBT Organisations in Singapore are specific to needs, ranging from Action from AIDS (AFA), Free Community Church, to Oogachaga. Look through them, you can find help within! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LGBT_organisations_in_Singapore If you don't feel comfortable with talking to anonymous people, find someone you can trust- online or offline, friends and family. Someone who has listened to you for your problems, stuck with you and will help you. Keep fighting- the very fact that you want to seek help for a normal, crippling issue is very proof that you are on the right track to recovery. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/07/is-everything-you-think-you-know-about-depression-wrong-johann-hari-lost-connections?CMP=fb_gu zackywacky and yoo_ris 2 Tech Reviewer on Rhyn Reviews and YouTube: https://youtube.com/rhynreviews. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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