Difficulties with depression are usually caused by some combination of these three things:

1. Difficult life situations

"Life events" and stress are often associated with becoming depressed. Losses like bereavement, redundancy or a relationship break-up are a common cause of depression.

Physical illness (especially heart attacks, strokes or painful conditions) often cause depression. Stress at work, or "grievance" (an unfair situation that you can't do anything to put right) are other situations that often cause people to feel down.

For some people the “trigger” for depression may not have seemed particularly serious in itself. It only became important because of a vulnerability caused by previous experience, often many years before.

2. Adverse early experiences

Our earliest experiences are central to the kind of people we become later in life. The earlier these take place, and the longer they go on, the more profound an effect they can have.

Serious "adversity" in childhood would include, for example, sexual, emotional or physical abuse. The loss of a parent or sibling may also have a lasting impact.

For some people, their problems are more to do with neglect, rather than directly painful events. This would include feeling unloved or uncared for. This often happens to children of parents who were alcoholic or drug users.

Sometimes parents don't realise their children were adversely affected. It's not unusual for this to happen for example to the youngest children in large families, or to children who had a brother or sister with a serious illness.

3. "Biological" illness

For some people depression is mainly ‘biological’ - a disturbance of brain and body chemicals. This may have a genetic basis. If this is relevant to you, then it's likely that you will need to consider antidepressant treatment to recover. Read more about your options in the ‘antidepressant’ pages.

But remember that antidepressants work best when people make other changes too - like self-help, practical changes in your situation and therapy of some kind.

Unique

For almost everyone, some mix of these three things has caused them to feel low.

Read stories to see some real life examples of depression.

"Antidepressants aren't the right approach for everyone"

"Other people seem to have coping mechanisms, but I just have a black cloud enveloping me..."