Depression affects many people. Now, researchers have pinpointed the areas of the brain that correlate with how we experience depression.
The brains of 909 people in China were scanned with an MRI. Half had depression and half didn't (421 to 488). The medial and lateral orbitofrontal cortexes (OFC) responsible for emotion and rewards/punishment operated differently in those who had depression. The lateral OFC activates when we are disappointed, like when an expectation is not met. For people with depression, this area of the brain was more connected to the area for our sense of self and identity, the precuneus.
This could explain part of the depression cycle. As expectation are not met, they think they are note valued by others or not worth getting what they thought they would get. They devalue themselves to lower their self-esteem and how they view themselves overall, their self-view, self-image and sense of self. Having the rewards and self-evaluation aspects connected too much leads to a backfire of what we might expect.
Coupled with this, is the finding that the medial OFC is less connected to the memory areas, meaning less recall of positive memories to balance out their perception of the negative happening now.
Researchers hope these finders could lead to specific treatment of the area of the brain required. An additional benefit is that negative thoughts in depressed people is reduced.
I did a post a while back teenage depression being on the rise. Even among adults it's an issue, as over 10% of people will have depression at some point in their lifetime.
I have long suspected that depression is a result of incorrect perfections of reality that produce unmet expectations due to not seeing reality correctly. As such, the root cause of depression is not in the brain, but psychological in consciousness. There is a feedback.
The drugs they want to develop are still only dealing with the secondary layer of how the brain reacts to epigenetic environmental factors affecting how we think, fee and act. Something happened in life that was not necessarily physical, but psychological in life, and this acts as a minor or major trauma to our psychological makeup, our self-view and world-view. And then the brain electro chemical operation is changed as a result. I don't deny some real physical issues that preexist psychological trauma.
@krnel
2016-11-22, 12am