by J Bartell
With regard to depression, medications don’t exactly “fix” the problems; they just mask the symptoms. When the medication is stopped, the issues or symptoms always return. Medications by their very nature are designed to block off feelings. They enable you to escape from the pain. However, more than pain is lost; pleasure in life is also diminished. And once the drug wears off, the problems are still there.
The hallmark of depression is now believed to be too little activity in the right and left prefrontal lobes (behind the eyes) and the right and left parietal lobes (on the side of the brain, toward the top), and too much activity in the limbic system.
But the limbic system and prefrontal lobes, which govern thinking, are wired together, notes Dr. Helen Mayberg, a professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Toronto who uses PET (positron emission tomography) scans to map depression in the brain.
In healthy people with sad feelings, the brain can quickly shift back to equilibrium. With depressed people, this ability to shift back to equilibrium is altered.
Today, many brain researchers view depression, which strikes about 19 million Americans, as a malfunction of circuits that connect the limbic system (“emotional brain”) to the prefrontal cortex (“thinking brain”) and the brain stem and hypothalamus, which control basic functions such as sleep, appetite, and libido.
In truth, there never was much proof that depression was merely a serotonin deficiency. That was an inference from data showing that people who are aggressive or suicidal often have low serotonin. But now, despite the obvious efficacy of serotonin-boosting drugs like Prozac (fluoxetine), it’s clear that when a person is depressed, there’s a lot more going wrong in specific areas of the brain than just low levels of serotonin.
Depression can be treated by getting the electrical circuits back to normal. The brain works by chemical and electrical signals. When an electric current passes through one cell, the cell releases a neurotransmitter, which floats to the next cell, causing it to “fire up electrically,” notes Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone, director of the transcranial magnetic stimulation lab at Beth Israel Deaconess.
A very important additional treatment to any kind of neuro stimulation, is of course, behavior modification/left-right brain learning/subconscious conditioning because a depressed person has many different issues with which to contend related to lifestyle, self-confidence and so forth. The marriage of the two treatments is paramount.
Author J Bartell specializes in left-right brain learning and suggestibility.
