Depression research paper, death and dying essay

death and dying essay

In dying, one does not progress neatly from a stage of denial to one of acceptance. Though Elisabeth Kübler Ross's On Death and Dying must be credited for focusing attention on the importance of being sensitive to the needs of the terminally ill, her stage theory describing the course of psychological adaptation to impending death has been widely criticized. The substance of the criticism is that there is no clear evidence to support Kübler-Ross's contention that, in the dying person, denial, anger, bargaining, and depression constitute a set of universal stages culminating in acceptance. Her critics insist that adaptation to terminal illness is influenced by a host of biographical factors such as age, sex, ethnic background, interpersonal relationships, personality, and life style.

death of a loved one essay

The death of a loved one is an irreversible disruption of an attachment and almost universally produces sadness, grief, and mourning. The universality of this response has led many theorists to regard it as a normal variant of the clinically depressed state. Attention to the similarities and differences between grief and depression were first discussed by Freud and Abraham, who emphasized that mourning following the death of a loved one is not a pathological condition. Both saw mourning as similar to "melancholia" in the pattern of symptoms, with the exception that loss of self-esteem is absent in mourning but prominent in clinical depressions.

death of a salesman essay

What we seem to have in Death of a Salesman, then, is a play that insists upon the meaninglessness of its main character and, we might extrapolate, of modern life in general. To use the words of Joseph Wood Krutch from a description of another character in modern drama, "Not only is" Willy's "failure utter, but it is trivial and meaningless as well" ( Two Modern American Tragedies). Other critics have reached such grim conclusions about Willy's life and death. Stuart B. James writes that "One of the striking things about" the play "is the metaphysically dead sound it gives off. All resonance of holiness is gone."

death of a salesman thesis

as Brian Parker says, the play "offers almost no sure values." Miller himself has written about modern drama that "we have abstracted from the Greek drama its air of doom, its physical destruction of the hero, but its victory escapes us." Though meant to describe the work of other dramatists, his comment seems to apply to Death of a Salesman. At least the victory of tragedy surely escapes Willy. And to the extent Miller uses his adaptation of the ritualistic form of tragedy to suggest the possibility of victory, he suggests that possibility, in terms of Willy, only to underscore Willy's meaningless defeat.

denmark term paper

The policy adopted with respect to colonial questions harmonizes very well with the characteristic tendency of the Danish attitude toward the United Nations, i.e., to utilize the possibilities afforded by the Organization for mediating between conflicting interests in international politics. In this case, however, one special feature dominates the picture, namely the fact that Denmark itself has been directly involved in those conflicts of interests which have arisen in connection with colonial questions. Until recently, Denmark was itself a colonial power. Of the former rich Danish tropical colonies, no part was left when the United Nations came into being.

research paper on teen depression

Moral education must also deal with negative images -- those that are tempting or frightening. Children are deeply disturbed by environmental pollution, by local evidence of weapons and drugs, and by the minefields in boy-girl relationships. The prevalence of teen depression and suicide and the breakdown of families require some recognition of these threatening topics at school, enough so that those most menaced will seek out an adult to trust with the burden of possibly unbearable sadness. Knowledge of the world's moral sleepiness can be highly motivating at this still somewhat safe time of life. It is a time when children should be tentatively deciding what job or cause could make their adult life meaningful and how to avoid the pitfalls -- discouragement, drugs, violence, and early parenthood -- that would ruin their dreams.

depression research paper

Each of the studies and methods described seeks to establish lawful relations among the variables of interest. Implicated in the search is the unstated goal of specifying on a probability level the cause for outcome, e.g., maternal depression causes depression in daughters. Of course, we do not say that because of a number of reasons such as: "There is no evidence that the causal links are that clear cut"; or "There are other sources for childhood depression other than maternal depression." In spite of such caveats, as well as our awareness that many of our statistical procedures are statements of relationships and not cause (zero order correlation), there is still the underlying search for cause--hence the preoccupation on philosophical as well as on empirical, scientific grounds of causal inference.

essay on depression

Many of the inconsistent findings on the role of social support in relation to various aspects of depression, especially onset, may have resulted from a failure to discriminate between attachment and affiliation in social relationships. Sheldon and West contend that most investigators implicitly assume that the same criteria can be used to identify these two constructs and that both serve the same functions although attachment involves a somewhat greater degree of intensity and intimacy. Sheldon and West tested the hypothesis that adults organize distinctive relationship expectancies for attachment and affiliation. Their research shows considerable support for their assumption though both constructs are related to affectional bonds as Ainsworth had contended.

research paper about depression

Cultural specialization in emotional life again raises the possibility of whether emotions, unknown to us, are part of the everyday experience of members of culturally distinct societies. A common assumption is that depression can be conceived on a continuum, as mood, symptom, or disorder. That there is a clear cutoff point between normal dysphoria and pathological depression has never been definitively demonstrated for our own culture. There is even less empirical reason to believe that it is identical across cultures. Partly for this reason, indigenous concepts of dysphoric affect cannot be so neatly partitioned from psychiatric definitions of depressive disorder.

research paper depression

While the influence of early developmental experience for subsequent onset of depression has long been presumed in psychoanalytic circles, empirical evidence for Western or cross-cultural examination of such theories has been lacking. In a recent review Campbell notes the surprising paucity of research on the family and depressive disorders. Nonetheless, there have been hypotheses concerning the etiology of depression in relation to cultural variations in socialization practices and family structure. Several family contextual factors have been examined, including number of primary caretakers (for presumed minimization of child frustration), family cohesiveness and extended networks, values orientations, and self-structures.