Someone mentioned that depression is caused by low levels of serotonin. This is kind of misleading--What causes the Serotonin levels to be low? What regulates serotonin production? You can go on and on--and many of the questions have no known answer, because we really know very little about how the brain does what it does, and in fact, we aren't all that clear on what all the functions of the brain really are--

The questions about the relationship between the mind, our consciousness, our spiritual selves, and how they relate to the physical brain and its chemistry, which really are at the root of the questions about psychology--well, forget about em--

Not much is understood about the way that many of the psychiatric drugs function, or why they work sometimes and not other times. The truth is that no one really can tell you what depression is...we recognize it chiefly by external signs, and we tend to miss those a lot of the time--Don't even think that you can understand what is going on in internally--

One thing that is starting to be clear--there is a definite correlation between physical trauma and depression--people who have suffered brain trauma almost always suffer from long term depression problems, the relatively recent use of a variety of brain scanning technologies is showing that a lot of people with depression have chemical and physical abnormalities within the brain that are similar to those who have suffered brain trauma.

A good guess is that many depression sufferers had an undetected brain trauma, perhaps at birth, or as the result of an undocumented or forgotten accident during childhood, or perhaps as the result of an illness, or even the exposure to undetected toxins.

To my way of thinking, the depression usually doesn't come from problems in childhood or in social adjustment--but it undermines the victim's ability to deal with those problems when they occur--Some people overcome every kind of problem, but some people, suffering from depression, can be unable to overcome any kind of problem--