Depression, and how it affects the brain.

Major depression is a common yet serious mental illness that causes low mood as well as several physical symptoms. Depression, especially when it goes untreated, can change the brain, making episodes worse or more frequent. It also impacts the body and physical health, causing fatigue, digestive issues, pain, and other complications related to poor decisions made when in a depressed mood. Treatment, especially dedicated residential treatment, can provide relief from depression symptoms and can begin to reverse the damage done to the brain and body.

Depression is one of the most common types of mental illness. A mood disorder, depression impacts between 15 and 20 percent of people, with women more often diagnosed. Depression can be debilitating and it can cause several serious complications, affecting both mental and physical health.

Suicide, poor nutrition, substance abuse, weight changes, and more are possible and typical consequences of untreated depression. But this illness can be treated, and often residential treatment is the best solution for managing symptoms and reversing damage to the body and brain.

More than just feeling down for a day or two, depression causes a bad mood that you can’t shake for weeks. Some of the key symptoms and signs of depression are: Persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness, loss of interest in activities you normally enjoy, difficulty sleeping or sleeping too much, weight gain or weight loss, extreme fatigue, anxiety, restlessness, frustration, or irritability, feeling worthless, guilty, or ashamed, difficulty concentrating, making decisions, or remembering, and lastly thoughts of suicide and death.

No one knows for sure what causes depression, but researchers have determined that it is a disorder that has biological underpinnings and that the chemistry of the brain plays a big role. Studies have uncovered how differences in the brain’s structure and chemicals may contribute to depression, but also ways that having depression changes your brain:

Cortisol and memory. Part of the brain called the hippocampus releases the hormone cortisol when you’re stressed, which includes episodes of depression. When your brain gets flooded with cortisol for long periods, it can slow or stop the growth of new neurons in the hippocampus. This results in the hippocampus shrinking in size, which in turn leads to memory problems.

Cortisol and the amygdala. The influx of cortisol triggered by depression also causes the amygdala to enlarge. This is a part of the brain associated with emotional responses. When it becomes larger and more active, it causes sleep disturbances, changes in activity levels, and changes in other hormones.

Brain inflammation. It isn’t yet clear whether inflammation is a trigger for depression or whether depression causes inflammation. But, studies clearly show a link, that people with depression have more inflammation in the brain. One study specifically found that people who have struggled with depression for more than ten years have 30 percent more inflammation. Brain inflammation can worsen depression, interfere with neurotransmitters that regulate mood, and negatively impact learning and memory.

Hypoxia. Hypoxia, or reduced oxygen, has also been linked with depression. The result of the brain not getting adequate amounts of oxygen can include inflammation and injury to and death of brain cells. In turn, these changes in the brain impact learning, memory, and mood.

Transmitters in the brain help one cell to communicate with another. However, we now know that there are more than a hundred neurotransmitters and billions of connections between neurons. So the %tone% of this hypothesis is limited.

For decades, we thought that the primary pathology in depression was some abnormality with these neuro-transmitters: specifically serotonin or norepinephrine. However, these neurotransmitters did not seem to be able to account for the symptoms of depression in people who had major depression. Instead, we think that the chemical messengers between nerve cells in higher brain centers, including glutamate and GABA, are possibilities as alternative causes for the symptoms of depression.

When you are exposed to severe and chronic stress like people experience when they have depression, you lose some connections between nerve cells and communication becomes inefficient and noisy. This noisy communication then tends to contribute to the biology of depression.

Treating depression effectively means returning the brain to look like a healthy brain. And while this can take a long time, new treatments have been needed to approach this disorder quite differently than before.