Many people feel depressed and doubt their own ability when falling into difficult living situations regularly for a long time. More seriously, if the depressed, sad, or apathetic mood persists for two weeks or more, especially when the difficult situation has ended, this could be a sign of depression- a serious disease ranked second after cardiovascular in terms of danger to humans, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

According to WHO statistics, approximately 3% of the world's population suffers from depression with an incidence of one in five people per year. Depression can persist for a long time or recur yet is curable, depending on each individual and the type of treatment

Depression features numerous physical and mental manifestations. Mentally, the first major symptom and sign is a sad mood, loss of interest even in previous concerns. People with depression are haunted by feelings of guilt, helplessness, worthlessness, and frequent thoughts of death. Physically, depression can make people tired and low on energy.

Sleep disturbances, insomnia, especially waking up early in the morning, or conversely sleeping too much are frequent warning signs of this disease. People with depression may also experience persistent aches, headaches, cramps, or digestive upset despite treatment. Depression can also negatively affect other chronic diseases. Disturbances in brain chemistry can affect both emotions and pain thresholds. Many doctors believe that well-treated depression can lead to an improvement in physical diseases.

It seems that no one can see the insurmountable difficulties coming from within, even depressed people themselves cannot clearly understand the causes of their suffering, deadlock, and despair. Moreover, depression poisons the life not only of the individual suffering from depression but also that of the whole family.

In the connection with communities and workplaces, depressed people often try their utmost to appear fine, leading to greater pressure. On the other hand, having friends and colleagues with depression is also a difficulty for many people since they do not know how to behave, what to do to help, what to avoid in order not to hurt them. On the contrary, the depressed person will have a much harder time if people around them do not know they are suffering from this severe disease.

However, depressed people often work with great responsibility because they have high demands on themselves no matter how difficult it is. Due to their, hard work, carefulness and high-intensity attention, their products are quality assured. Thanks to these personality traits, some electronics and information technology companies are always interested in finding and giving special compensation for depressed people.

Apart from that, depressed people are often sensitive people, so they can become genius composers, great artists, musicians, painters, writers or poets. Many of them sacrifice their whole lives in suffering and struggle to bring us masterpieces of art.

There are many ways to treat depression, ranging from medication to non-pharmacological talk therapy aside from many companion measures such as exercise, light therapy, pet raising, vitamin supplements, omega 3, functional foods. It is still possible to use advanced treatments such as nerve stimulation therapy, Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), magnetic stimulation to help improve the disease

Most importantly, people with depression need to properly understand their disease and find the right treatment for them. It is necessary that depressed people go to the doctor to receive proper treatment and do not search online to self-diagnose the disease. At the same time, their relatives, family, friends, community, and colleagues also need to have a correct and complete awareness of this serious illness.

If we are always ready to sympathize and share with people with incurable diseases or COVID-19 patients and their families, then we also should try to understand and sympathize, share with people with depression and their families. Let's engage in learning more information about depression, understand, empathize and share more about the sufferings and hardships that people with depression and their loved ones go through.

Reporting by Assoc. Prof. Dr. NGUYEN THI PHUONG HOA (*) - Translating by T.VY

(*) Major in psychology, author of books: When the dark clouds come (2018), There is a pain called depression (2019)