Depression

A person’s mood varies, reacting to events in their life and the world around them. Usually a person is happy when they achieve something or saddened when they fail a test or lose something. A person who is sad is said to be 'depressed,' but the low mood brought on by every day setbacks differ from the clinically depressed. With this paper, I plan to address the underlying causes of unipolar and bipolar disorders. Also to be addressed are the symptoms of each disorder and the treatments available for individuals dealing with these disorders.

Unipolar and Bipolar are both forms of depression but although the two are in the same medical family, they share different symptoms. Unipolar is a depression where the individual is depressed but does not have a manic phase incident. Bipolar is a depression where the individual is depressed and does have a manic episode. “Bipolar depression and unipolar depression may look very similar; these similarities often led to bipolar depression being misdiagnosed, sometimes for years, before a person gets the correct diagnosis and thus the correct medicines for the condition.” (NIMH 2005)

The difference between bipolar depression and unipolar depression is that people with bipolar depression usually have had a manic episode in the past. Bipolar disorder has two main phases: a depressive phase and a manic phase. With unipolar depression, a person has never experienced a manic episode. A person experiencing the depressive phase of bipolar disorder may feel sad and hopeless and the things that they once enjoyed or were interested in do not seem fun anymore. They may also feel anxious or guilty. A person suffering through the manic phase may also at times have large amounts energy and do not need to sleep as much.

Unipolar affects a greater amount of females then males and its onset appears later in life. Bipolar does not discriminate and affects both sexes but the onset appears to start after puberty, around the age of 18....