5 ms·

Uncovering depression's web in the brain

85 points by clumsysmurf 10y ago

joewee 10y ago
Ad free source: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/news/depression146s_physical_source/ http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/news/depression146s_...
0xcde4c3db 10y ago
I think this finding is being overblown in some places, but it does seem to get at part of depressive experience that few people want to acknowledge. You can do everything right, have something good happen as a result of your efforts, recognize your role in the good thing happening, and still feel deeply disappointed. The major psychological models of depression pretty much assume that this kind of backward response can't happen, which can lead to borderline gaslighting about how you're "really" evaluating things.
- throw20160915 10y ago
  When this happens, is this a reasonable sign that the depression is clinical? My understanding of clinical is that it's chemical.
  - adrusi 10y ago
    "Clinical depression" refers to Major Depressive Disorder, which is the name given to the common set of psychiatric dysfunctions that have persistent depression as their primary symptom. That is, "Clinical depression" refers to an entire disorder (a set of symptoms grouped together in the literature) rather than as an individual symptom. This is to distingish it from "depression" used as the name of a symptom or other disorders, like bipolar. "Clinical" depression is not depression that is caused by chemistry rather than psychology. We have no idea whose depression is caused by what, really, and chemistry/psychology probably isn't a meaningful distinction to make in this context.
  - psyc 10y ago
    Actual psychiatrists do not distinguish much between so-called "situational" depression, vs some hypothetical "100% organic" depression. That seems to be rampant on Internet message boards for some reason. A psychiatrist will ask about your life circumstances a little bit, but if you have certain symptoms, whether you perceive them as externally caused or not, they will diagnose you with Major Depression, i.e. "clinical depression."
  - greenshackle2 10y ago
    Clinical just means that you have been diagnosed with Depression by someone with a bunch of letters after their name, as opposed to colloquial depression, which means something like 'feeling blue'. To be diagnosed you need to meet a number of criteria like 'loss of interest, fatigue' nearly every day for a long period. As far as I know there is no expert consensus on whether depression and Depression are different shades of the same thing or qualitatively different. 'Depression is a chemical imbalance', as a model, is about on par with 'the internet is a series of tubes'. It's not flat out wrong, but it's so oversimplified as to be pretty useless for fixing or making predictions about the system.
- cpncrunch 10y ago
  That might be true, but it may also be that you just haven't found the cause. It's not always obvious what is causing the depression. In my own case, certain things in my life were just not right (which I didn't realise at the time), and I didn't realise at the time how much they were affecting me. However once I changed those things, the depression cleared up completely. YMMV.
- yolesaber 10y ago
  You just described my entire condition. I've had therapists tell me that I didn't want help because of these feelings and that things were fine I shouldn't really worry (they actually said this to me). Reasonable comment from an outsider perspective maybe, but doesn't really help or offer any insight. The gaslighting comment is all too real. I wonder what's wrong with me because I don't feel contented. I feel like a fake all the time and then I feel like a fake for feeling like one. It's madness. Somehow I'm still able to carry on, but it's not fun.
  - fsloth 10y ago
    Sounds like your therapists were not best suited for you. Mind if I ask which style of psychotherapy they practiced?
    - yolesaber 10y ago
      I'm not entirely sure. One was a fancy lady with a union square office who was recommended to me by a friend. She was nice but tried directing everything towards my family which I thought was distracting. The best therapist I ever had was an older man from upstate NY who practiced zen buddhism. He was technically a psychiatrist I suppose but we had incredible talk sessions and he helped me manage it during the worst episodes (first years of college), because we mostly just talked about poetry or writing or anything but normal therapy territory. I'm not sure where he is at now but I would like to find something similar to that. But to be honest I'm pretty burnt out on therapy and my mood swings make it hard to build a consistent rapport with most practitioners. Also therapy is INCREDIBLY expensive and many don't take insurance. It feels screwy.
      - fsloth 10y ago
        The list of various styles of psychotherapy is vast and they differ greatly in their approach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_psychotherapies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_psychotherapies Cognitive behavioural therapy is one of the well known ones and to my understanding tends to focus on concrete patterns of behaviour rather than digging out some deficit in parental relationships https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy Totally amateur here but unfortunately a bit familiar of depression. What you described sounds like a familiar pattern and CBT was helpfull in that.
- prodmerc 10y ago
  Disappointed? Like, actually feel disappointed? I dunno, I just don't feel anything. Good things, bad things - it's all "OK. Next." But my general mood is leaning towards negative.
phkahler 10y ago
It bothers me that they claim to witness "circuits" connecting different areas of the brain. AFAIK they just use FMRI or similar to see which regions are active and make correlations, which is quite different that watching an actual circuit or "neural pathway" firing in real time.
dilemma 10y ago
Materialistic science is the #1 obstacle to understanding the nature of depression. Depression is a reaction to an unhealthy environment, but science pathologizes the individual biology.
- PaulHoule 10y ago
  Biological psychiatrists would not disagree with you. Serotonin is associated with dominance and social status in animals. If you get "beat down like a minion" you are very likely to have your serotonin system get in bad shape.
  - oconnore 10y ago
    How do you decide what's environmental and what's chemical when everything in your brain is chemical, and you can't isolate the environment?
    - PaulHoule 10y ago
      Your brain runs on chemical energy, sugars and such. It is all chemical and it is all the environment.
- saulrh 10y ago
  Isn't a good chunk of depression genetic? That is, sure, it's a reaction to an unhealthy environment, but you have to have the predisposition that makes you respond with depression, otherwise you just deal with it?
  - cpncrunch 10y ago
    It's just another factor. Some people are just more predisposed to depression. However I imagine that it's possible for everyone to get depression with the right circumstances.
smegel 10y ago
> it is increasingly becoming clear that many forms of the condition are caused by either chemical imbalances, brain abnormalities or connections between neurons in the brain Ka-ching! A drug company CEO just bought another yacht. I wonder if the people here who support the pathologising of unhappiness support the mass drugging of school children afflicted by "ADHD". Look at how France deals with such issues and you see there are other ways. Pills for the brain, mass incarceration, gun culture and junk food - things America fails at and leaves the rest of the world shaking its head in amazement.
- WalterSear 10y ago
  I'm glad that you haven't had much experience with clinical depression.
  - jjbiotech 10y ago
    I see this rhetoric every time this subject is brought up. Keep on believing there is something wrong with you. Keep paying your pharmacy to supply you with SSRIs to "fix" your brain. Sounds really healthy.
    - WalterSear 10y ago
      SSRI's don't work for me, as does pretty much everything: I feel let down by the medical establishment. However, I know what depression feels like, and how different that is from sadness.
      - jjbiotech 10y ago
        All I'm trying to say is there are alternative paths in treating depression, besides popping pills. These alternative and "wholesome" remedies are rarely recommended though, because there's no financial incentive. A doctor/pharmaceutical company makes no money by recommending a healthy diet, sufficient exercise, and socialization. Pharmaceutical fixes should never be a first choice for treatment. And it seems like you're telling me that I've never experienced "true" depression. You have absolutely no basis for that 1.) because you don't know me 2.) because our perceptions of reality are unique.

85 points by clumsysmurf 10y ago

Ad free source: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/news/depression146s_physical_source/ http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/news/depression146s_...

0xcde4c3db 10y ago

I think this finding is being overblown in some places, but it does seem to get at part of depressive experience that few people want to acknowledge. You can do everything right, have something good happen as a result of your efforts, recognize your role in the good thing happening, and still feel deeply disappointed. The major psychological models of depression pretty much assume that this kind of backward response can't happen, which can lead to borderline gaslighting about how you're "really" evaluating things.

throw20160915 10y ago
When this happens, is this a reasonable sign that the depression is clinical? My understanding of clinical is that it's chemical.
- adrusi 10y ago
  "Clinical depression" refers to Major Depressive Disorder, which is the name given to the common set of psychiatric dysfunctions that have persistent depression as their primary symptom. That is, "Clinical depression" refers to an entire disorder (a set of symptoms grouped together in the literature) rather than as an individual symptom. This is to distingish it from "depression" used as the name of a symptom or other disorders, like bipolar. "Clinical" depression is not depression that is caused by chemistry rather than psychology. We have no idea whose depression is caused by what, really, and chemistry/psychology probably isn't a meaningful distinction to make in this context.
- psyc 10y ago
  Actual psychiatrists do not distinguish much between so-called "situational" depression, vs some hypothetical "100% organic" depression. That seems to be rampant on Internet message boards for some reason. A psychiatrist will ask about your life circumstances a little bit, but if you have certain symptoms, whether you perceive them as externally caused or not, they will diagnose you with Major Depression, i.e. "clinical depression."
- greenshackle2 10y ago
  Clinical just means that you have been diagnosed with Depression by someone with a bunch of letters after their name, as opposed to colloquial depression, which means something like 'feeling blue'. To be diagnosed you need to meet a number of criteria like 'loss of interest, fatigue' nearly every day for a long period. As far as I know there is no expert consensus on whether depression and Depression are different shades of the same thing or qualitatively different. 'Depression is a chemical imbalance', as a model, is about on par with 'the internet is a series of tubes'. It's not flat out wrong, but it's so oversimplified as to be pretty useless for fixing or making predictions about the system.
cpncrunch 10y ago
That might be true, but it may also be that you just haven't found the cause. It's not always obvious what is causing the depression. In my own case, certain things in my life were just not right (which I didn't realise at the time), and I didn't realise at the time how much they were affecting me. However once I changed those things, the depression cleared up completely. YMMV.
yolesaber 10y ago
You just described my entire condition. I've had therapists tell me that I didn't want help because of these feelings and that things were fine I shouldn't really worry (they actually said this to me). Reasonable comment from an outsider perspective maybe, but doesn't really help or offer any insight. The gaslighting comment is all too real. I wonder what's wrong with me because I don't feel contented. I feel like a fake all the time and then I feel like a fake for feeling like one. It's madness. Somehow I'm still able to carry on, but it's not fun.
- fsloth 10y ago
  Sounds like your therapists were not best suited for you. Mind if I ask which style of psychotherapy they practiced?
  - yolesaber 10y ago
    I'm not entirely sure. One was a fancy lady with a union square office who was recommended to me by a friend. She was nice but tried directing everything towards my family which I thought was distracting. The best therapist I ever had was an older man from upstate NY who practiced zen buddhism. He was technically a psychiatrist I suppose but we had incredible talk sessions and he helped me manage it during the worst episodes (first years of college), because we mostly just talked about poetry or writing or anything but normal therapy territory. I'm not sure where he is at now but I would like to find something similar to that. But to be honest I'm pretty burnt out on therapy and my mood swings make it hard to build a consistent rapport with most practitioners. Also therapy is INCREDIBLY expensive and many don't take insurance. It feels screwy.
    - fsloth 10y ago
      The list of various styles of psychotherapy is vast and they differ greatly in their approach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_psychotherapies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_psychotherapies Cognitive behavioural therapy is one of the well known ones and to my understanding tends to focus on concrete patterns of behaviour rather than digging out some deficit in parental relationships https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy Totally amateur here but unfortunately a bit familiar of depression. What you described sounds like a familiar pattern and CBT was helpfull in that.
prodmerc 10y ago
Disappointed? Like, actually feel disappointed? I dunno, I just don't feel anything. Good things, bad things - it's all "OK. Next." But my general mood is leaning towards negative.

phkahler 10y ago

It bothers me that they claim to witness "circuits" connecting different areas of the brain. AFAIK they just use FMRI or similar to see which regions are active and make correlations, which is quite different that watching an actual circuit or "neural pathway" firing in real time.

dilemma 10y ago

Materialistic science is the #1 obstacle to understanding the nature of depression. Depression is a reaction to an unhealthy environment, but science pathologizes the individual biology.

PaulHoule 10y ago
Biological psychiatrists would not disagree with you. Serotonin is associated with dominance and social status in animals. If you get "beat down like a minion" you are very likely to have your serotonin system get in bad shape.
- oconnore 10y ago
  How do you decide what's environmental and what's chemical when everything in your brain is chemical, and you can't isolate the environment?
  - PaulHoule 10y ago
    Your brain runs on chemical energy, sugars and such. It is all chemical and it is all the environment.
saulrh 10y ago
Isn't a good chunk of depression genetic? That is, sure, it's a reaction to an unhealthy environment, but you have to have the predisposition that makes you respond with depression, otherwise you just deal with it?
- cpncrunch 10y ago
  It's just another factor. Some people are just more predisposed to depression. However I imagine that it's possible for everyone to get depression with the right circumstances.

smegel 10y ago

> it is increasingly becoming clear that many forms of the condition are caused by either chemical imbalances, brain abnormalities or connections between neurons in the brain Ka-ching! A drug company CEO just bought another yacht. I wonder if the people here who support the pathologising of unhappiness support the mass drugging of school children afflicted by "ADHD". Look at how France deals with such issues and you see there are other ways. Pills for the brain, mass incarceration, gun culture and junk food - things America fails at and leaves the rest of the world shaking its head in amazement.

WalterSear 10y ago
I'm glad that you haven't had much experience with clinical depression.
- jjbiotech 10y ago
  I see this rhetoric every time this subject is brought up. Keep on believing there is something wrong with you. Keep paying your pharmacy to supply you with SSRIs to "fix" your brain. Sounds really healthy.
  - WalterSear 10y ago
    SSRI's don't work for me, as does pretty much everything: I feel let down by the medical establishment. However, I know what depression feels like, and how different that is from sadness.
    - jjbiotech 10y ago
      All I'm trying to say is there are alternative paths in treating depression, besides popping pills. These alternative and "wholesome" remedies are rarely recommended though, because there's no financial incentive. A doctor/pharmaceutical company makes no money by recommending a healthy diet, sufficient exercise, and socialization. Pharmaceutical fixes should never be a first choice for treatment. And it seems like you're telling me that I've never experienced "true" depression. You have absolutely no basis for that 1.) because you don't know me 2.) because our perceptions of reality are unique.