Researchers treat depression by reversing brain signals traveling the wrong way
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Re: Researchers treat depression by reversing brain signals traveling the wrong way
#2Really fascinating stuff. I immediately wonder if there is any explanation for this reversed flow of signals that might tie it into an evolutionary theory of depression e.g. the social withdrawal hypothesis - is the brain using less energy doing things this way?
Re: Researchers treat depression by reversing brain signals traveling the wrong way
#3It’s fascinating how many potential modalities are at play with depression. Serotonin, inflammation, direction of brain signals. This suggests that depression may be a label that points to one of many underlying conditions, which could also explain why it’s so tricky to treat for some individuals.
Re: Researchers treat depression by reversing brain signals traveling the wrong way
#4[deleted]
Re: Researchers treat depression by reversing brain signals traveling the wrong way
#5> “It’s almost as if you’d already decided how you were going to feel, and then everything you were sensing was filtered through that,” he said. “The mood has become primary.”
This is 1000% what depression feels like, once you've properly come to terms with it. Your brain seems absolutely compelled to apply the most horrific, negative interpretation to everything that happens to you.
Even when you understand it's wrong, or at least heavily negatively biased, fighting those interpretations feels like trying to swim upstream in a terrific current.
Re: Researchers treat depression by reversing brain signals traveling the wrong way
#6Unfortunately, TMS is extremely expensive and not likely to be covered by most insurance plans. Even with a decent PPO, I was quoted about $1k a treatment and they said I needed at minimum 30 treatments.
Re: Researchers treat depression by reversing brain signals traveling the wrong way
#7It’s fascinating how many potential modalities are at play with depression. Serotonin, inflammation, direction of brain signals. This suggests that depression may be a label that points to one of many underlying conditions, which could also explain why it’s so tricky to treat for some individuals.
I have a pet theory that much of what we call mental health and chronic illness will eventually be traced back as a symptom of some causative factor - most likely infectious or environmental - rather than being a base illness as we think of them now.
Much as we don't think of "fever" as an illness any more, I suspect "depression" will become descriptive rather than predictive - which, to an extent, it already is, at least according to the DSM as I understand.
It's also possible that we'll see it as something that is multifactorial - some genetic susceptibility combined with environmental and/or infectious triggers.
Re: Researchers treat depression by reversing brain signals traveling the wrong way
#8It’s fascinating how many potential modalities are at play with depression. Serotonin, inflammation, direction of brain signals. This suggests that depression may be a label that points to one of many underlying conditions, which could also explain why it’s so tricky to treat for some individuals.
As someone who has more or less successfully learned to deal with depression, ADHD, anxiety, etc., the trick is basically doing everything considered "healthy."
We don't understand all of the mechanisms of long-term illnesses like depression, diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer's, etc. but we do know how to fight them: exercise and good diet. *
Some processes in the human body obviously get disrupted under modern conditions, so it's important to give your body something it's a little more used to: more movement, more traditional foods.
* (Obviously, it's not going to automatically fix depression in all cases, but it's absolutely worth fighting the good fight if you can. Other treatments are definitely worth trying too.)
Re: Researchers treat depression by reversing brain signals traveling the wrong way
#9Unfortunately, TMS is extremely expensive and not likely to be covered by most insurance plans. Even with a decent PPO, I was quoted about $1k a treatment and they said I needed at minimum 30 treatments.
There are effective alternatives which are a fraction of the cost: ketamine (sublingual ~100mg every few days), psilocybin (free? cheap 2-3g ~4 weeks), rapamycin + ketamine also seems promising (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-020-0644-9).
Re: Researchers treat depression by reversing brain signals traveling the wrong way
#10It’s fascinating how many potential modalities are at play with depression. Serotonin, inflammation, direction of brain signals. This suggests that depression may be a label that points to one of many underlying conditions, which could also explain why it’s so tricky to treat for some individuals.
Fully agree, to me depression is a common symptom that the system of biological processes “outputs”, if you will, when some process isn’t running optimally.
Stopped sugar suddenly? Inflammation from food you’re eating? IBS in general? Traumatic upbringing leading to entrenched “thought loops”? Undiagnosed disease?
These all and more can have depression as a symptom.
My armchair psychologist opinion is the DSM 5 category process isn’t fitting correctly to how humans operate. I believe there’s a completely different modality that has yet to be discovered (or known in mainstream science) that gives us a better way to diagnose people.
I find it nuts that you subjectively, in most cases, ask the patient if they fit in usually 3 of 5 categories, or what not, and that determines the diagnoses. Countless times it’s like “okay, what does hyper mean?” “What does intense rumination mean?”
We need a more objective way to measure these criteria.
I was diagnosed with depression for a while, tried a bunch of drugs, none really worked. Then for shits I do a neurological adhd battery and lo and behold, seems like that’s it.
Now using the correct behavioral changes leads to the depression going away, and far higher quality of life.
I know the system, DSM 5, is best we have now, but we need more innovation in this space