by Youngbear Roth

Created on: December 28, 2010   Last Updated: December 29, 2010

Situational depression, anger, and anxiety – while certainly clinical (chemical) after a certain stage – often begin in childhood as risk factors being taught by parental behavioral examples or early traumatic environmental experiences before the personality evolves a practice for introspection and strength to bounce back. 

Some infants are born with the genetic chemical propensity towards Clinical Depression and its attendant emotions, but parenting and environment have a pronounced effect over whether the amount of control one's natural propensity takes is as master or servant in later life.   

My therapeutic specialty is adult Clinical Depression.  Long term Clinical Depression is in essence a 'symptom' expressing a fundamental chemical pathology.  The symptom presents itself as stages of one's finite awareness being estranged from the universe – a finite stranger to one's infinite self.

In addition to expressing a chemical pathology, Clinical Depression is the most advanced stage symptom as it has progressed from a mental – emotional disease to a program of commands from the finite mind demanding upon the physical body a damaging change in chemical behavior.

Some of the more common specific risk factors for long term Clinical Depression from within the family unit are early sexual abuse, physical abuse, mental abuse in the subtle form of parents teaching their children through example unresolved narcissistic patterns, extreme fears such as abandonment, death, and a lack of physical contact.  As an example, abandonment and death fears are common amongst children of holocausts survivors who are at higher risk for developing early situational anxiety and depression and later adult Clinical Depression.

Environmental risk factors outside the immediate family unit may be anxiety due to poverty, fear of physical abuse from strangers, deficiency of proper daily nutrition, housing, and lack of positive role modeling within one's peer group or popular leaders.

These are only a few of the factors that can lead from childhood into an adulthood of never feeling safe or at home or at one with the world at large.

Eventually, body chemistry responds to mental commands of fight or flight, or frustration as a result of circumstances that work against the chance of evolving a positive and healthy self-image and world-view.

Treatment modalities are numerous and growing everyday and include a wide range of anti-depressant medications along with transpersonal and transformational, spiritual and philosophical psychotherapies and physical therapies.  Promising Eastern contemplative therapies such as Yoga have begun to prove valuable as a cooperative part of a traditional allopathic program of medication.  

However, at this time the identification of causes and proper treatments for managing Clinical Depression are hit and miss – there are no absolute cures.  Understanding risk factors and treatments for Clinical Depression is a work in progress.

  

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