Depression

Thursday is National Depression Screening Day, marked by various Baltimore-area health services offering free screenings for depression, which affects 16 million Americans. To find a screening near you, call 800-573-4433.The screenings, intended to gauge need for further evaluation, involves taking the following questionnaire, developed by Dr. Douglas G. Jacobs of Wellesley, Mass., director of National Depression Screening Day. It is designed to be used in conjunction with an evaluation by a health care professional.

IN ONE state capital after another, angry citizens are marching against their governors and legislators. If they are not waving placards proclaiming the vileness of tax increases, they are chanting against the unfairness of cuts in services. "Morning in America" is as dark as midnight, and it's not even lunchtime.But prosperity in America has had a long run. If you are under 55, you have no memories at all of the Depression. You have to be 65 to have spent your childhood in the '30s. You have to be 75 to remember trying to find a job at a time when young men thought themselves lucky to be in the Civilian Conservation Corps or the Works Progress Administration, two make-work programs of the '30s.

I suspect I have a different relationship with oranges than do most people. My father always placed one in the toe of our Christmas stockings, as was the old Depression-era custom. Then, an orange given for Christmas was a rare and wonderful gift -- a burst of sweetness in a grim diet of oatmeal. My father carried on this tradition and so our stockings would droop with the weight of this instructive gift. There were many such instructive gifts, and sometimes our shoulders drooped with the weight of them.

THE harsh winds blew last February. Anger at my ineptness overwhelmed me and propelled me into an abyss of depression.So little control I have over others, over myself! How angry I can become, and there is nothing to do with the anger but consume it. I turn my head away from problems, wishing them gone forever. How hard to right the wrongs in society! Our labors are usually in vain, for only a concerted effort will do. Then a turning comes in the midst of illness, a glimmer of hope.I was recuperating from surgery, lying in bed, listlessly turning the pages of the newspaper, when a miracle happened!

Orioles starting pitcher Justin Duchscherer, who has been on the 15-day disabled list since the end of spring training and who has pitched in just five games since 2008, opened up about his clinical depression for an article in the latest issue of Men's Journal magazine, which hits newsstands tomorrow. Duchscherer was diagnosed with clinical depression in 2009 after he went through a divorce and injured his throwing elbow. The Orioles were aware of Duchscherer's physical and mental health issues when they signed the two-time All Star to a low-risk, $700,000 one-year contract during the offseason.

NEW YORK -- From Beirut, Lebanon, to Los Angeles to Christchurch, New Zealand, more people than ever before are seriously depressed, and younger people are hardest hit, according to a new report."

CHICAGO -- It was a time, it seems in hazy retrospect, of sweet simplicity -- lemonade on the porch, hammocks in the trees and virginity past 14 -- a time when the only crack was the one in the sidewalk you stepped over to avoid breaking your mother's back.It was the time of the '50s, and for six seasons and 234 episodes, a time for a TV series that now seems to have typified Eisenhower-era innocence. A sitcom of white-bread sensibility, "Leave It to Beaver" was, gee, kinda neat, even though that creep, Eddie Haskell, sometimes made things pretty lousy for the Beav and junk like that.

William Styron's memoir, "Darkness Visible," is an expanded and revised version of a lecture he gave here in April 1989 at an Annual Symposium on Mood Disorders sponsored by the Depression and Related Affective Disorders Association (DRADA) and the Department of Psychiatry of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.Like the other 400 members of that audience, I was moved by Mr. Styron's description of his gradual descent into the despair of clinical depression and by his wit in protesting the name "depression" and in recounting his "surrender" to occupational therapy in the hospital.

Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon recently said the city is entering into a period "worse than the Depression." This week, Jim Press, vice chairman of Chrysler, told the Associated Press, "If we have a catastrophic failure of one of these car companies, in this tender environment for the economy, it's a huge blow. It could trigger a depression." These leaders are far from alone in their apocalyptic thinking. In an unscientific, online survey in The Baltimore Sun, 46 percent of respondents agreed that "the U.S. is heading for an economic downturn on a par with the Great Depression."

Tomorrow is Secretaries' Day. Across the country, men and women will make a particular effort to thank the people who make up their support staffs. But while secretaries are being thanked, let's also take a minute to look at their attitudes toward their work and the impact it may have on their total sense of well-being.Several years ago, William Eaton, Ph.D., professor of mental hygiene at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, published a study on the prevalence of depression in different occupations.