Theories of Depression: Towards an Understanding of the Art of the Person in Nursing.
There are complex understandings being generated today about the influence of mind, brain and body, emerging from interdisciplinary neurobiology, psychoanalysis, social, and health sciences. Interactions of the body and the mind in contexts of the larger social environment are now found to have direct effects on neurobiological functioning. As such, the questions about what causes depression are not so important as complicating the theories about depression. This necessary complication of theory is essential for understanding the depressed person as a complex person, and for generating kinds of intervention therapies that can ease the symptoms of depression. Because there is no specific cure, as yet, for depression, it is crucial that people in the health care professions have greater theoretical resources for understanding the relations between the environment and the person. Nurses in particular need to participate more with the work of theorizing, because they mediate the relations between the client, or patient, and the larger medical institution that effects their care. Indeed, all theory needs to attend to the importance of this relation of mediating the person's relations between care, and the institutions that are historically designed to contain and control the body. Care and interaction are, thus, a site of theory not only for nursing, but for all people who are socially responsive to their environment. 10 pgs. bibliography lists 8 sources.