What is depression? How is it seen by psychological, psychiatric, and religious authors? How is it related to religion and religious factors?
What Is Depression?
Depression is a term referring to a disabling and prevalent psychiatric illness, major depressive disorder (unipolar depression). But the term also refers to a number of other related states. Unipolar depression must be distinguished from (1) depressed mood, which is a normal emotional response to adversity, especially involving loss, which if transient is not considered a clinical problem; (2) bipolar disorder, a relatively uncommon psychiatric condition involving uncontrollable swings from elated manic phases to low, depressive phases; and (3) dysthymic disorder, a milder disorder involving the symptoms of clinical depression but as few as two such symptoms (plus depressed mood) qualify the sufferer for the label dysthymic. There are a number of varieties of major depressive disorder and dysthymia, for example, seasonal...
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Loewenthal, K.M. (2015). Depression. In: Leeming, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27771-9_161-5
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