Imagine walking in your house to find a loved one dead. This happened to Karen Green on September 12th, 2008. Karen found her husband, David Foster Wallace, on their patio. David decided to take his own life by hanging himself. He was a well-known author and he created a lot of work. Most of them revolve around depression. David struggled with depression for a long time. Another great author Iris Chang suffered with depression as well. Iris Chang is known for writing “The Rape of Nanking”. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and struggled with depression as well. In 2004, Iris drove herself to a distant road and shot herself in the head. People thought she was murdered or she received death threats but her parents knew that she was dealing…show more content… It damages the brain and how to brain functions. The biggest change noticed in the brain is in the hippocampus. The hippocampus is the stretched out ridges along the bottom of each lateral ventricle inside of the brain. It is known to be the middle point of all memory, emotion, and the autonomic nervous system. In the brains of people with frequent depression, the hippocampus is significantly smaller in size. Depression also causes increased aches in pains, fatigue, decreased appetite, decreased interest in sexual activities, insomnia, overwhelming sadness, the feeling of emptiness and clinginess, preoccupation with death, weight changes, weakened immune system, and even heart attack risks. Not everyone with depression have these symptoms, these are just the common ones that doctors look for but many people are very skilled at hiding their symptoms and how they feel so that makes it even harder to detect…show more content… Emanuel Bubl of the University of Freiburg and his team recruited forty patients diagnosed with major depressive disorder and another forty healthy controls matched for sex and age. They showed all of them different black and white patterns and used pattern electroretinography to measure the reactions of their eyes. Electroretinography uses electrodes placed on the cornea to check the electrical activity of the cells in the retina, with the size of the response. The patients with MDD reacted differently than the others. They had reduced contrast gain-related activity, this indicated that the patients with MDD had less sensitivity to contrast. They also noticed the people with greater depression seemed to have an even lower contrast than those with just mild to slightly major depressive disorder and those on antidepressants had a slightly larger response than those who were not on any. The accuracy of this study was greater than ninety percent, but when it comes to depression it is hard to fully determine if it is from the depression or other sources such as medications or environmental
