What Causes Clinical Depression In The Brain
Some people experience depression during a serious medical illness.
What causes clinical depression in the brain. Rather there are many possible causes of depression including faulty mood regulation by the brain genetic vulnerability stressful life events medications and medical problems. The result may be emotional flooding persistently negative views of oneself and the world hopelessness and depressed mood. Neurotransmitters are naturally occurring brain chemicals that likely play a role in depression. Many pharmaceutical companies just use the people s misconceptions about the illness to their advantage.
Recent research indicates that changes in the function and effect of these neurotransmitters and how they interact with neurocircuits involved in maintaining mood stability may play a significant role in depression and its treatment. Depression is an extremely complex disease. With most drugs that aim to treat depression they advertise that low levels of serotonin in one s brain actually cause depression. There is some debate concerning the causes of depression.
Research suggests that depression doesn t spring from simply having too much or too little of certain brain chemicals. On the one hand it is considered a physiological disorder of the brain. The hippocampus is located near the center of the brain. You might have heard that depression stems from a chemical imbalance and that s partly true.
But brain inflammation during depression is linked to the amount of time a person has been depressed. Serotonin which regulates mood emotion and sleep. Signals are sent through the brain and in fact the entire nervous system by special chemicals called neurotransmitters. In rarer cases a minor head injurycan damage the pituitary gland which is a pea sized gland at the base of your brain that produces thyroid stimulating hormones.
The hippocampus amygdala and prefrontal cortex. However no research in the past actually came to this conclusion. No one knows exactly what causes it but it can occur for a variety of reasons. It s still not clear however whether inflammation causes depression or vice versa.
In people with depression the levels of certain brain chemicals are thought to be out of balance particularly these neurotransmitters.