Clinical Depression Affects The Brain
Q.Depression can be a completely incapacitating experience. Symptoms of depression can restrict our ability to work, to interact with others or take care of ourselves. Such a deeply frightening and overwhelming experience is understandably one that we want to eliminate from our lives as quickly and dependably as possible. And antidepressant medication seems to offer us this possibility.
A.According to Yapko, the most accurate answer to the question, “What causes depression symptoms and what causes clinical depression?” is “Many things.” There are: biological factors (including genetic, biological and neurological vulnerability) psychological factors (such as your coping style, temperament and ability to calm and regulate yourself), and social factors (your early life experience, your current family atmosphere, and the degree of social support you have and use). If we rely only on advertisements, we will have an entirely biological view of depression that may go so far as to declare “depression a serious disease that only your doctor can diagnose,” as some of the commercials state. But such statements ignore the huge amount of irrefutable evidence that depression symptoms and clinical depression involves much, much more than just “bad chemistry.” There are many reasons why the information about other factors in depression, some at least as important as the biochemical, is not as available to the general population as the “chemical imbalance” theories, including the following: Billions of dollars go into the advertising budgets of pharmaceutical companies to promote the view of depression as a “disease” requiring drug treatment. Physicians are intensively trained to define and treat most problems biologically and may have a great tendency, almost a reflex, to prescribe chemical treatments. Finally, there is a cultural shift to explain all our problems biologically with the result that there is less pressure to take personal responsibility and make hard personal changes. What about chemical imbalances? The chief problem with the view of depression as a consequence of a “chemical imbalance in the brain” is the fact that depression can be both triggered by and resolved by life events. The misconception the commercials foster is that the brain somehow develops a chemical imbalance and the result is depression, occurring in a single directional process. In fact, the relationship between brain chemistry and experience is a two-directional phenomenon: Life experience affects brain chemistry at least as much as brain chemistry affects life experience.
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