Depression

            
            
             An overwhelming sense of hopelessness that enveloped her in ninth grade. "It was like a cloud that followed me everywhere," she says. "I couldn't get away from it." Brianne started drinking and experimenting with drugs. She was caught shoplifting at a local store and her mother drove her home in what Brianne describes as a "piercing silence." With the clouds in her head so dark she believed she would never see light again, Brianne went straight for the bathroom and swallowed every Tylenol and Advil she could find-a total of 74 pills. She was only 14, and she wanted to die. A few hours later Linda Camilleri found her daughter vomiting all over the floor. Brianne was rushed to the hospital, where she convinced a psychiatrist (and even herself) that it had been a one time impulse. With a schizophrenic brother and a cousin who committed suicide, Alan, her Dad, thinks he should have known better. After another aborted suicide attempt a few months later, she finally ended up at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. Now, after three years of therapy and antidepressant medication, Brianne, 19, thinks she's on track. A sophomore at James Madison University in Virginia, she's on the dean's list, has a boyfriend and hopes to spend a semester in Australia-a plan that makes her mother nervous, but also proud (Wingert). This is not an uncommon situation people find themselves caught up in, which is a very scary thing. Depression, as a disease, is a fairly new and serious discovery. What depression is, how serious it can be, and who suffers from the disease will all be put together in the following report to come to a probable solution.
             Suicides and attempts, just like Brianne's, follow one after the other. Numbers are .
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             rising and we need to figure out why. A major influence on people who attempt suicide is a disease known as depression. Yes, it is a disease.