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Depression as a neurodegenerative disorder

Fukyo

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With some reservation since this was written by Jonah Lehrer...


I read this article about 4 years ago, found it very fascinating and disconcerting, but couldn't find it, until yesterday. Could be old news by now though.


How Prozac sent the science of depression in the wrong direction

For decades, researchers struggled to identify the underlying cause of depression, and patients were forced to endure a series of ineffective treatments. But then came Prozac. Like many other antidepressants, Prozac increases the brain's supply of serotonin, a neurotransmitter. The drug's effectiveness inspired an elegant theory, known as the chemical hypothesis: Sadness is simply a lack of chemical happiness. The little blue pills cheer us up because they give the brain what it has been missing.

In recent years, scientists have developed a novel theory of what falters in the depressed brain. Instead of seeing the disease as the result of a chemical imbalance, these researchers argue that the brain's cells are shrinking and dying. This theory has gained momentum in the past few months, with the publication of several high profile scientific papers. The effectiveness of Prozac, these scientists say, has little to do with the amount of serotonin in the brain. Rather, the drug works because it helps heal our neurons, allowing them to grow and thrive again.
 

Hadoblado

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*Sigh*

This is the last thing I wanted to hear. If four years have gone by and I still haven't seen much on it, and it's by a scientist of dubious character, can I just ignore it? Please?
 

Minuend

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It's an interesting thought.

Personally I have difficulties with concentration, short term memory/ train of thought, brain fog that are there even when I have been out of my worst episodes. My mind is never perfectly clear.
 

Cognisant

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I'm sceptical, not calling BS just yet but from an AI perspective pain and pleasure roughly work by making and unmaking associations; our behavioural patterns, our brain's self generated procedures, are reinforced by pleasure because the input you're receiving is (supposedly) beneficial and when it's not they're dismantled to stop you doing it.

E.g. Why is pleasure good?
Because there's a self supporting feedback loop supporting the idea that pleasure is good whereas the notion that pain is good undermines itself because pain invokes the mechanisms involved in changing the brain.

There's obviously a lot more to it than that but I digress, my point is that neurodgeneration could be a symptom of depression, not the cause, y'know we don't experience information loss and if neurons are constantly (forcibly?) being disconnected from one another well it's not hard to imagine that's what is damaging them.
 

Cognisant

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Depression is very much a first world problem, I don't think it's the food we eat or the chemicals we're exposed to (we're healthier and live longer than people who live "in the wild") rather I think the real nature of the problem is the disconnect between our daily efforts to improve our lot in life and the ways in which our efforts come back to us.

Put simply we have a Sisyphian lifestyle.

I work in retail and it's incredibly unfulfilling, I do the same things over and over but nothing really changes, I fix the shelves and the next evening they're a wreck again, I fill the shelves and the next evening they're empty again, the only difference between me and Sisyphus is that he was working out of spite whereas I have a boss to answer to. But at least I don't have an office job, I get some exercise doing what I do, I'm free to daydream, chat with my coworkers and I meet new people all the time, so although it can be dull it's not unbearable.

To live in a city and stay sane you really need to find something outside of work to do, be it painting, going out with friends, playing games, watching movies, or maybe something more productive, it doesn't matter what it is, what matters is that you get a sense of fulfilment, of progression, some excuse to think you're not just pointlessly existing, persisting, waiting to die because you haven't worked up the will to commit suicide yet.

That's what depression is, people thrive on adversity, we rise to our challenges, but when we are not challenged, when our adversity is either so great or obtuse that we don't know how to even begin to overcome it we give up and become depressed.

No pill will cure that.
 

just george

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I don't really believe that that is the useful mechanism of action (despite not being able to qualify that)

Howeverrr I would like to see such an idea take root, since one of the drugs that has been shown definitively to repair neurons is, of all things, LSD.

Therefore, LSD should immediately come off the schedule 1 drug register, since it absolutely has therapeutic benefit according to this mode of action.
 

Beat Mango

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