Humor will not be tolerated!! -Portia

I keep seeing this idea that depression/other mental health issues can simply be summed up as a "chemical imbalance" in one's brain, that if you just pull some levers and throw some serotonin at it, you'll be completely untroubled.

I'm a fairly materialist person, but this seems so ... off to me. No one who has a nervous breakdown can be reduced to just neurons firing. I think that a more holistic view of emotional health may be, ultimately, best. What if you do have a character flaw, and you tend to take setbacks badly? Maybe it's amenable. I've known people who are incredibly resilient in the face of real distress, and others who snap pretty easily. I don't think it's just chemicals, and I guess to me, saying, hey, here are new paradigms, isn't necessarily minimizing of what can be a crappy situation.

Maybe bringing back the distinction between "melancholic" depression and other problems, self-inflicted or not, would be helpful. Just thinking out loud.

Ultimately, all of our emotions come back to neurons firing in our brain. But the same effect can have different causes. Some people may be born with a natural chemical imbalance. However, people who are raised with poor ways to react to situations, or who develop the "character flaw" of taking setbacks badly, will also be more prone to reacting this way. The more someone reacts in a certain way, the stronger those neurochemical pathways get, and they basically create the same chemical imbalance through repeated use of those emotional pathways.

In other words, the science is eventually the same in either case, but there are totally two very different causes of being born with a chemical imbalance, and conditioning your brain to create that imbalance through your behavior.

In either case, I think medication and therapy can be effective. Medicine addresses the chemical side but doesn't really change which pathways are stronger. Therapy teaches you to react differently. As you react differently over and over, you strengthen those neuro pathways instead.

Zedability wrote:Ultimately, all of our emotions come back to neurons firing in our brain. But the same effect can have different causes. Some people may be born with a natural chemical imbalance. However, people who are raised with poor ways to react to situations, or who develop the "character flaw" of taking setbacks badly, will also be more prone to reacting this way. The more someone reacts in a certain way, the stronger those neurochemical pathways get, and they basically create the same chemical imbalance through repeated use of those emotional pathways.

In other words, the science is eventually the same in either case, but there are totally two very different causes of being born with a chemical imbalance, and conditioning your brain to create that imbalance through your behavior.

In either case, I think medication and therapy can be effective. Medicine addresses the chemical side but doesn't really change which pathways are stronger. Therapy teaches you to react differently. As you react differently over and over, you strengthen those neuro pathways instead.

Hmmm, I'd like to read more about this, if you have Articles.

Do you ever read so much about a topic that you have no idea which specific sources taught you which things? That's me and neuroscience haha. But I'll keep my eye out for you.

What you are talking about sounds a lot like this, which, coincidentally, I mentioned in the "What are you reading" thread not too long ago.

I agree...mental illness should be treated holisically-- a combination of therapy and drugs works best for the vast majority of us.

Emiliana wrote:I agree...mental illness should be treated holisically-- a combination of therapy and drugs works best for the vast majority of us.

Hell, we could do well to treat physical illness more holistically. This is just another symptom of Western medicine which tends towards the analytic.

My day was actually pretty much the perfect example of this. I've been horribly stressed this week with work stuff and family stuff and halfway through the day today my chest felt all tight and my thoughts were racing. So I took a tiny bit of Xanax to get through the rest of the day. Then when I got home I talked to Marx and realized that I had a couple of thought habits going on that were making things worse. I was internalizing too much of my coworkers' stress (three of them have lost parents in the last year, two are getting divorces, we've all gained weight from stress, etc...). And I was also blowing some of my mistakes way out of proportion, like being scared that I was going to get fired because I didn't turn in lesson plans. So after we talked through that, we took the dogs to the park and I walked a couple of miles while Marx shot hoops and now I feel about 80 times better.