Brian Primack, MD, PhD, dean, College of Education and Health Professions, and professor, public health, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Ark.; Nathaniel Counts, JD, senior vice president, behavioral health innovations, Mental Health America, Alexandria, Va.; American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Dec. 10, 2020, online

Noble, Rudolf E. “Depression in Women.” Metabolism, W.B. Saunders, 19 Apr. 2005, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0026049505000363. 


Depression is the leading cause of disease-related disability in women. Women go through so much in their life, in the article it’s shown that women have a greater risk for developing depressive disorders during their “child-bearing years”. Depression during pregnancy is very common, women go through depression during the “different phases of the reproductive cycle”. The author states that pregnancy is one of the main reasons leading to depression because of hormonal change. Us women hide so much pain which destroys us in the end. There are so many people who don’t admit to depression because of the thought of being judged.

Another major reason leading to depression would be social media. Everything is about social media; from food, to dressing, to makeup, to games. We compare ourselves to people online, seeing them on vacation while you’re sitting at home, or seeing them look so beautiful and then looking at yourself. It’s all about comparing one another, that’s what’s killing us, we can never be satisfied with what we have instead we want what we see. Study shows “1,000 adults aged 18 to 30 who were depression-free at the outset, based on a standard questionnaire”. We spend so much time on social media that we believe everything we see. We may have problems at home and as an escape from reality we go on social media apps to distract ourselves. Instead, it makes it worse for us because we start comparing our lives to other people.

I believe Brian’s article has a good beginning, it shows why social media affects young teens, and how it’s taken over our lives. This research will help us learn about how real depression is, and how we shouldn’t judge, we never know what they’re going through.

Third annotation:

Depression is getting serious in today’s life, many think depressions is a joke, or it’ll go away as time goes. But little do they know if depression is not treated a certain way it can get worse overtime. People can start to have suicidal thoughts. Depression can get so worse till a point where we don’t complain about it, we continue to bare with the consequences. 

An example of a real-life story, I interviewed one of my close friends about her side of the story and how she was going through tough times. She didn’t want her name to be out there, but she was willingly to share her story. Many of us teens start to date at an early age, in which we go through many breakups, we learn from our mistakes, but some relationships/breakup usually led us to a very bad ending. Being so attached to a significant other and then falling apart and becoming strangers again could damage you. 

Based only on my friend’s experience she learned a lot from her mistakes from her past relationship, she finally found peace and settled for one person. “Being in love could be so difficult in the end,” she said. I never really understood what that meant. But she said once you fall in love with someone there’s no going back, getting your heart attached could be the worst thing because at the end you put yourself through so much pain that it’s hard letting go. From my perspective I’ve seen her go through so much, days she would cry nonstop, not eat food, sometimes even end up in the hospital. But she still smiled everyday but behind that smile she was broken apart. She was torn to a point where she could feel pain anymore, she was so used to what was happening with her that day by day it was just getting worse. “Being in love and then getting attached could kill you at the end because of your own expectation” she said.  This clearly shows how teens go through so much pain, but they tend to hide it because they aren’t getting the help they need. 

I believe there’s many different levels of depression, it starts off when you feel lonely, when you don’t want to talk to anyone, lack of sleep, loss of appetite. And at the last level it’s when you start to have suicidal thoughts. We tend to overlook depression not knowing how many people are affected by it on a daily basis. Just looking at a person smiling we cannot guess what they are mentally or physically going through.