The Great Depression

Depression has always been a problem everybody has struggled to deal with at one point of their lives or another. Approximately fifteen percent of Americans have experienced it. Ninety percent of people of commit suicide have depression if not other diagnosable mental disorder.

It’s natural to speak of how “depressed” people are. However, the occasional sadness everyone feels due to life’s disappointments is very different from the serious illness caused by a brain disorder. Depression profoundly impairs the ability to function in everyday situations by affecting moods, thoughts, behaviors, and physical well-being. Manic depression, now more commonly known as bipolar disorder, is a condition where a person can be depressed and lethargic one minute, elated and overactive the next. Prominent figures such as Virginia Woolf, Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, to name a few, have been clearly diagnoses with having such a condition.

Virginia Woolf, the writer who came up with the famous novels: Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando, was said to have had manic depression at an early age. She was driven to depression by...