Depression The Mayo Clinic Staff (2012) defined depression as “a medical illness that causes persistent feeling of sadness and loss of interest”. Depression can affect all aspects of a person’s life. Their work activity can start declining, friends and family can start to disappear, and physical health can change. Depression affects how a person feels, thinks, and behaves on a day-to-day basis. Depression can make someone feel that life is no longer worth living. It can make doing daily activities hard. Depression is a very serious illness. Contrary as to what some people think, it is not something a person can just snap out of, it requires long-term treatment. Symptoms of depression can range from emotional to physical to mental. The Mayo Clinic Staff (2012) listed some symptoms of depression. Some of these include: feelings of unhappiness or sadness, irritability or frustration, loss of interest, changes in appetite, slowed thinking, speaking, or body movements, fatigue, frequent thoughts of suicide, and crying spells for no reason. The symptoms of depression can be different for everyone. Some factors that change the symptoms are age, gender, and cultural backgrounds. There is no specific cause of depression but researchers have found a variety of risk factors that are known to increase the risk of depression. The Mayo Clinic Staff (2012) listed some of these as: having biological relatives with depression, being female, early childhood trauma, experiencing stressful life events, having a serious illness, abusing alcohol or drugs, and having low self esteem. The most popular treatments for depression are medications and long term psychological counseling. One social determinant of health that can greatly affect a person and cause them to go into a state of depression is stress. Stress can be defined as anything that poses a threat to our well being. We generally use this word when we feel like everything in our life is becoming too much to handle. Everyone at some point or another experiences stress, but some people can handle it better than others. Stress can cause some people great harm because they do not know how to go about handling it. It can cause someone to go into depression because they feel that life is never going to get better. Their depression could get worse if the person feels they do not have the right social support, another social determinant of health. Social support is the help and encouragement one gets from their friends and family members. If someone feels they do not have any social support it can make them feel alone and depressed because they think they have no one there for them. When someone is going through a tremendous amount of stress having good social support can help bring them through it. If someone feels as no one is there for them it can be very detrimental to their mental and emotional health and it can cause them to become depressed. Stress definitely plays a huge role in the life of a college student. With everything a college student has to balance between school work and actual work and their social life, it can be a bit much to handle. It can get really stressful sometimes. Having social support is really helpful when dealing with this stress.