A most common disease in the world. How to help a person with depression

March 24 is World Depression Day. Doctors say that depression is one of the most common mental disorders, which is the number one problem in mental health. According to experts, it affects about 300 million people worldwide, regardless of age and gender. It's believed that women prone to depression are twice more than men. But the reason for it might be that men are just more secretive.

The pandemic, isolation, social distancing, and other changes in daily life caused by COVID-19 have unfortunately only exacerbated these staggering statistics. Anxiety and depressive disorders are worsened and recorded in people who've survived the death of relatives, had a hard time with the disease, lost business, job, life goals, faced with other negative phenomena of the new reality. Numerous studies show that the restrictions associated with the coronavirus pandemic have negatively affected the mental health of the population. There are no official statistics in Ukraine that would allow us to understand the current state of this disease in our country. But, for instance, an analysis conducted recently by the US National Science Foundation found that only half of the young people between the ages of 18 and 24 have symptoms of depression.

Latin depressio means decrease, deepening. Usually, people talk about depression:

"Where there could be emotion, there's emptiness"