Psychotic Depression and You

Humans are quite susceptible to depression. You may think that depression only strikes those who have experienced highly disturbing events in such as war, fatal accident, or natural disaster. However, the fact shows that hereditary and genetics also play role in developing depression.

Today, nearly 25 percent of depressed hospitalized people who suffer from psychotic depression. This type of depression is mostly caused by abnormal function of thyroid gland or by overproduction of particular hormone produced during those stressful times of life.

If you have a family with a history of psychotic depression, chances are you bear a higher risk of establishing depression with psychotic features. According to recent study a family history of psychotic ailment such as schizophrenia multiply this risk. However, possessing a genetic predisposition for particular mental illness, which includes psychotic depression, does not assure that a person will develop the issue. There are other factors, including drug abuse that may cause the illness to emerge.

Psychotic depression is a mental disease that is a mix of depression and psychosis. It comprises feelings of serious depression. It involves aspects of psychosis that can manifest into irrational behavior, hallucinations, and delusions. You can see that those suffering from this mental illness feel that something goes wrong with their physical body or outward appearance. These people may show unreasonable anger or they may mess their lives around by having bed sleeping all day long but staying awaken through the night. They may care less about bathing, changing their clothes, or paying attention to their look.

It is unfortunate that many people with psychotic depression are usually aware that their apparitions, hallucinations, delusions, and fantasies are not founded. This situation makes it more difficult to diagnose the disease since these sufferers tend to hide their signs out of embarrassment. As the result, inaccurate diagnoses are quite common.

If you experience extreme sadness, fatigue, lethargy, despair, paranoia, agitation, disproportionate rage, impaired cognition, suicidal thoughts, insomnia, and irrational fears, then be careful. Those could be the signs of psychotic depression. When the symptoms are misunderstood, misdiagnosed and left untreated, they could be debilitating and fatal.

In terms of treatment, if you or someone you know show signs of psychotic depression, then you should immediately get medical attention. There are antidepressant medications that can help to control depressive symptoms such as depressed mood, fatigue, apathy, feelings of guilt or worthlessness, and lack of interest in fun activities. To treat drastic mood swings and delusions, doctor may give you prescribed mood-stabilizers, antipsychotic drugs, and counseling sessions. When severe psychotic is found, the electroconvulsive therapy or ECT could be given using particular electrical shock.

Fortunately, there are measures that you can take to prevent psychotic depression. It is important to acknowledge your risk factors, which include having family members who have depression or psychosis. Improving your coping skills for life stresses, tragedy, adversity, and trauma is very helpful to avoid the depression. It is also important to stay away from certain personality traits such as selfishness, narcissism, low self-esteem, excessive fears, lacked empathy, and impulsiveness because along with substance abuse they highly contribute to psychotic depression.

Compared to depression alone, psychotic depression is more difficult to treat as the symptoms are more frequent causing more disabilities. If you want to involve in eliminating this mental disease from our society, you can help by educating the public and children to stop using substances including cannabis, alcohol, cigarettes, and other illegal drugs as all of them change neurotransmitters in the brain that lead to psychotic ailments including psychotic depression.

Stalis Ethica is an experienced article writer and a writer manager with science background. She specializes in writing informative articles in various niches.

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