Among Christians and non-Christians alike, depression remains one of the most misunderstood emotional problems. As a minimum, depression is considered a destructive emotion. On the far other end of the scale, many uninformed Christians consider the onset of depression as symptomatic of a demonic condition. The fact is that depression is neither of these things. Depression is a biochemical imbalance in the brain that can be caused by emotion and external stimuli, or it can be endogeneous, that is, it can manifest itself for no apparent reason at all.
Symptoms of depression are as varied as the persons that it strikes.
Depression may also cause any number of other physical symptoms that will fully baffle the patient and the family physician because these symptoms will persist despite a lack of evidence pointing to any clear organic cause. For the sake of simplicity, we will limit our discussion of depression to two basic types. A reactive depression is precisely what the term implies. It is a depressed state brought on by a reaction to a particular emotional stimulus. Reactive depressions result from a variety of life events such as the death of a loved one, a divorce, or the trauma of a child leaving home for the first time.