Diagnosis and Treatment: Answers

1. Explain why diagnosing a mental illness such as depression is not as precise a process as diagnosing a physical disease.

Diagnosing a mental illness such as depression is not as precise because the symptoms are not as evident, as if you have chicken pox or a flu. It is also difficult to diagnose them because it depends on the person, and their mental and emotional balance, which they are not the same always. Many mental illnesses also have over lapping symptoms.

2. What is the DSM-IV and how is it used in the diagnoses and treatment of depression?

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and Mental of Mental Disorder is a manual published by the American Psychiatric Association that includes all currently recognized mental illnesses. The coding system utilized by the DSM-IV is designed to correspond with codes from the International Classification of Diseases, commonly referred to as the ICD. Since early versions of the DSM did not correlate with ICD codes and updates of the publications for the ICD and the DSM are not simultaneous, some distinctions in the coding systems may still be present. For this reason, it is recommended that users of these manuals consult the appropriate reference when accessing diagnostic codes.

3. Explain how the culture a person belongs to can influence whether or not they are diagnosed with a mental illness such as depression.

The culture of a person is very important because the culture of the person influences her behavior. The way the people think, if they are pessimist and believe they are the worst. This can be diagnosed as a mental illness but this is just a pattern of behavior in their culture. Also because the culture influences people to know how they react to certain situations, and every culture/person has a different reaction. 

Learned Helplessness and Enviromental Theory

Learned Helplessness is a word I was not familiar to at the beginning of this section. By now I know that learned helplessness is the hopelessness and resignation learned when a human or an animal perceives no control over repeated bad events. Meaning that it is a coping mechanism some people employ in order to survive difficult or abusive circumstances. One example of learned helplessness is that an abused child may eventually learn to remain passive and compliant in the hands of the abuser, since the efforts to fight back or escape appear impossible. This is because if the child remain calms and passive the anger of the abuser may end faster, because he is not fighting back, which means that he is causing "no pain", he might eventually get bored and stop. Many people stay in these relationships due to learned helplessness.
In relation to depression, learned helplessness takes a huge role in this type of events. Learned helplessness comes from stressful situations, trauma events, and childhood abuse. This is relates with the environmental theory of depression. This theory states that the environment is the responsible one for having depression, and this is the same situation that learned helplessness encounters. Stress is one of the events in the environment that calls upon itself depression and learned helplessness. If someone studies really hard for a test, and in the end of the test they think they did really good, but at the time that they get their grade back they flunked they will encounter the stress of the situation and evolve learned helplessness and depression. Learned helplessness to "understand" that no matter how hard they study they will never gets a good grade. Depression because they studies so hard, and did not even make the grade they deserved.
The environment is the one responsible for these situations both learned helplessness and depression. The theory of environment with related with both actions, and explains in a better way, that your actions in life will affect your state of mind and emotions.

Cognitive Theory of Depression

Cognitive behavioral theorists suggest that depression results from maladaptive, faulty, or irrational cognitions taking the form of distorted thoughts and judgments. Depressive cognitions can be learned socially as is the case when children in a dysfunctional family watch their parents fail to successfully cope with stressful experiences or traumatic events. Or, depressive cognitions can result from a lack of experiences that would facilitate the development of adaptive coping skills.

According to cognitive behavioral theory, depressed people think differently than non-depressed people, and it is this difference in thinking that causes them to become depressed. For example, depressed people tend to view themselves, their environment, and the future in a negative, pessimistic light. As a result, depressed people tend to misinterpret facts in negative ways and blame themselves for any misfortune that occurs. This negative thinking and judgment style functions as a negative bias; it makes it easy for depressed people to see situations as being much worse than they really are, and increases the risk that such people will develop depressive symptoms in response to stressful situations

(http://www.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=doc&id=13006&cn=5)

Environmental Theory of Depression

The environmental theory of depression takes in considerations various events in the people's lives. Environmental causes of depression includes things us stress, traumatic events and childhood difficulties.  These are events that can occur to anyone, and that happen in our daily life. They are considered factors that are outside of ourselves, and that we can not control. 

Stress is one of the environmental factors that c

auses a ton of depression. Stress alters your body and emotions making you develop depression. No matter if it is good stress like planning a wedding, or a super event. Or if it is a bad stress like one that is suffering the death of a loved one. In conclusion, stress has a very tight relationship with depression. 

It is a fact that many people has suffered from a traumatic event before having depression. Traumatic events in the lives of people include a loss of a loved one, a serious medical illness, or the loss of a marriage. These types of events can destroy the sense of control and stability in a person's life, often leading to emotional distress. 

It has been long known that childhood difficulties lead to depression. These can include sexual, physical or emotional abuse, parental separation or mental illness in one or both parents. The most difficult event to bear is the separation or the death of loss one before the age of eleven. People that have lived these events are more probable to develop depression. 

(http://www.depression-help-center.com/environmental_causes.htm)

Biological Theory of Depression

Evidence that depression is related to genetics has been growing recently as more and more research is being preformed to determine the role the brain and heredity play in the likelihood an individual will develop depression. Studies show that at least half of the depressives have increased levels of activity in the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis of the brain. Another medical evidence is the documentation of higherthan normal amounts of cortisol discharges in the adrenal glands of depressives, and eccentric brain wave powers as recorded by electroencephalograms. 

Research has also shown that depression is something that is hereditary, and that has a tendency to run in families. Researches have published that there is a reason to believe depression can be inherited and is thus a biological disease. When doing a studies to twins, it was 80 percent likely that they will both develop bipolar depression, due to their genes. People disagree with the biological theory because it ignores environmental factors of life.

(http://www.holysmoke.org/sdhok/why-dep.htm)