Biological Causes Of Depression Essay

887 Words4 Pages
Background Depression was first talked about in the texts in the second millennium B.C. In this period, most disorders were said and thought to be causes by possession of the body by demons. The treatment of the diseases was for the person to be purified by a priest (Nemade, Ph.D., Reiss, Ph.D., Dombeck, Ph.D.). People thought it was a spiritual disease rather than a physical one. That differs greatly from our thoughts today. We don’t seem to relate spiritual values with medicine. Finally, Ancient Greeks and Romans thought that depression had biological and physical causes. Hippocrates, a Greek physician, proposed that personality and psychiatric disorders were correlated because of the substances called humors which came as yellow bile, black…show more content…
Because the view is now accepted that depression has multiple causes, including biological, psychological and environmental causes, it is important that different specialists find a treatment for each cause separately (Nemade, Ph.D., Reiss, Ph.D., Dombeck, Ph.D.). Because of these various conflicts in the cause of depression throughout history, I will be researching to what extent depression is the result of one’s environment rather than biological or psychological factors that influence depression. This has always been debated throughout history, and still there aren’t obvious showing of what the causes of Depression exactly include. Based off of the history of how the causes of illnesses such as depression’s causes were formulated, a Bio-psycho-social model was created. It is the model of causation and shares the belief that all mental disorders are the result of biological, psychological, and environmental factors (Grohol, Psy.D.). George Engel made the biopsychosocial to form a dualistic view on humans where there is a mutual incorporation of mental and physical factors (Borrell-Carrió, Suchman, and Epstein). These ideas that the illnesses include these three factors are very vague since there have not been experiments done to prove which has the most effect on the cause
Open Document