It's More Common Than You Think!

The human mind races with streams of a sundry of thoughts everyday. Your thoughts may range from various problems with school, family, or friends, or emotions ranging from hapiness all the way to depression. According to a post written by Alina Tugend in the New York Times , "Negative emotions generally involve more thinking, and the information is processed more thoroughly than positive ones, he said. Thus, we tend to ruminate more about unpleasant events — and use stronger words to describe them — than happy ones." Therefore, I would like to pose a few questions. What if a person's life is swallowed hole by negative events with sprinkles of pleasant times? What if their life was full of positivity with few negativity?Would we still focus on all the negative?

Questions like these make me wonder if this could be a leading factor in why depression is becoming more relevent in our society. Could this mean that we are surrounded by more negative influences? Alone, I know I have a lot of conflicting thoughts and ideas due to the fact I constantly battle with severe depression every day and night and I grew up in this generation.

"You are never too lonely, as you may think you are."-Lauren Cain
I quote this for two reasons, such as: many other teenagers suffer with the same issue as I do and depression is always there to taunt with your mind.

Here is a video that explains depression and the types of depression.
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"It is a biochemical change in the brain. It affects an estimated one in eight teenagers in the United States, according to the Center for Mental Health Services, the administrator of the nation's mental health services system (Cnn.com). "

By being a person who suffers with this problem, I know from experience that it's not a weakness that only few suffer from. Information, such as the quote above, encourages me. Especially, to help others understand that you cannot focus on the negativity and you're not the only one who is experiencing this alone. This proves that people understand how you feel. From personal experience, depression is like trying to swim in an ocean with multiple cinder blocks tied to your feet. No matter how much you swim up, struggle, and pull up, you continue to drown and fall deeper into the deep silence. However, it may be hard to understand why people could feel this way, but just know that you don't want to expirence what depression is like.

Through this, another issue arises. 54% of people believe depression is a personal weakness according to the National Mental Health Association study reported in MSNBC Health Today. I am not surprised at these statistics because I have come in contact with many people in fear of depression making them look weak which it doesn't. This severely hurts me because I know many suicides could have been prevented if that person knew that depression is not a weakness and you can seek help.For this reason, if I come in contact with anyone I know that is having these problems, I try to talk them through it and suggest they seek medical help.

In conclusion, people need to see that depression is very common and need to treat the sufferers with care. Trust me, you wouldn't want to live in the mind of a depressive person. It's painful. In the future, I would like to see more awarness campaigns about depression arise because it seems to have little attention for a problem so wide spread.