biology & depression

If depression is actually biological instead of solely psychological, then you can understand that saying "pull it together man!" is kind of like giving a diabetic a hard time about all that insulin. That is one of the points of the Infinite Mind radio program about depression. You'd never roll your eyes and think a diabetic could be a stronger person and just regulate their insulin on their own, would you?

On top of that, it turns out that when someone is depressed there are actual repercussions in the brain: the hippocampus (which regulates the ability to learn and remember) begins to shrink. They can actually correlate the size of the hippocampus with the number of days a person has been depressed. Keep in mind that some people are depressed for years.

"When one is stressed, the body secretes hormones called glucocorticosteroids. It's known that these can damage the nervous system, causing neurons to shrivel up or even killing them, in a part of the brain called the hippocampus. The hippocampus is essential for learning and memory. He said new imaging techniques now have allowed researchers to see that in people with recurrent depression, there is atrophy of the hippocampus. This clearly shows depression is biological."

On top of this, I wonder (and now I am a bonafide lay person, so take this with a grain of salt)... will they end up finding a correlation between Alzheimer’s or Dementia with depression?

There are other correlating implications as well. As the hippocampus begins to shrink, the part of the brain that regulates anxiety (the amygdala) begins to grow — in other words, making you more susceptible to anxiety disorder.

My bottom line is, while prescriptions for anti-depression medicines are more and more common place, and as we as a society scoff at this and think "just suck it up people and handle this on your own," what if we are dismissing a very real and important medication for a very real and prevalent biological disease?

» Infinite Mind: Depression