Assignment: Depression Paper Stress and situational depression are seen as just a part of life. As people grow and experience life, they encounter events that trigger stress and signs of depression. These events can include changes in the professional world, death, and academia. Mood changes like these are temporary and quite common. Aside from these normal phenomena, true depression, or clinical depression, is found in 1 in 10 Americans. Clinical depression is a mental illness that can impede normal daily functioning. In this assignment I will examine two forms of clinical depression, unipolar and bipolar depression. Depression can be so debilitating that it can drive a person to suicide. This depression is called Unipolar. According to the American Psychiatric Association's DSM, unipolar depression is described as a significant depressive period that lasts more than two weeks. During this period an individual exhibits a minimum of five depressive symptoms (Comer, 2005). Symptoms of depression can include inability to concentrate, loss of appetite, insomnia, and daily bouts of depression. Unipolar depression is assumed to be caused by a combination of factors, rather than having a universal cause. According to the Black Dog Institute of Australia, depression is partly a genetic biochemical imbalance of the neurotransmitters serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine in combination with stress ("Fact sheet", 2009, Causes of depression). The organization's studies have found that individuals who exhibit high levels of anxiety, which may be experienced as an "internalized 'anxiety and worry' style or as a 'more externalized irritability, shyness, expressed as 'social avoidance' or ' pe..... half of the document ......not to assist them in trying to deal with the family, work and social issues that undoubtedly occur when experiencing bipolar disorder (Comer, 2005). Bipolar may share some similar characteristics and may sometimes seem the same. These two types of disorders are caused in a similar way, but their treatments differ significantly from each other. Unipolar is a depressive disorder mood disorder that changes dramatically between depression and mania, so each disorder must be addressed accordingly. References Comer, R.J. (2005). New York: Worth.Fact Sheets [Information about depression and bipolar disorder Australia]. (2009, June 19).Black Dog Institute. Retrieved July 3, 2009, from http://www.blackdoginstitute.org.au/factsheets/index.cfm