Depression is more than feeling down. It may physically change your brain. This can affect how you think, feel, and act. Experts aren't sure what causes these changes.
Research by the National Institutes of Health shows that you lose gray matter volume (GMV) when you suffer from depression. This loss is caused by parts of your brain shrinking due to the hormone cortisol impeding the growth of your brain cells. The more serious depression a person suffers, the more GMV they lose.
When someone has a mental illness, it affects the brain's chemistry and function. It disrupts the communication between the neurons. These changes also affect the flow of neurotransmission. Mental disorders are linked to changes in levels of the chemicals in the brain.
The majority of changes and damage to the brain caused by untreated depression are not believed to be permanent, but more research is still needed. When depression is effectively treated, most people commonly experience an improvement in symptoms, and their brains return to typical function and structure.
“This means that the brain structure of patients with serious clinical depression is not as fixed as we thought, and we can improve brain structure within a short time frame, around 6 weeks,” said Eric Ruhe, from Rabdoud Medical Center, Nijmegen, the Netherlands .
Certain brain changes can be persistent or permanent, but this can vary widely depending on the type of injury and the substance of abuse. Many substance-related neurological complications or consequences may also be reversible.
Pharmacological (e.g., antidepressant medications) and nonpharmacological interventions (cognitive-behavioral therapy, exercise) may reverse stress-induced damage in the brain.
Some believe it is unlikely that antidepressants cause any permanent changes to brain chemistry in the long term. The evidence seems to indicate that these medications cause brain changes that only persist while the medication is being taken or in the weeks following withdrawal.
According to the Mayo Clinic, patients with untreated long-term depression are more prone to sleep disruptions, heart disease, weight gain or loss, weakened immune systems, and physical pain.
Rewiring Your Brain During Anxiety
When the brain is anxious, it becomes hardwired (i.e., its neural pathways become fixed) to be overly sensitive to stress hormones and threats that are associated with anxiety. New neural pathways can be developed by engaging in activities that force the brain to make new connections.
If we want to develop new habits of thinking, feeling, and/or behaving, we can consciously rewire our brains. At first this intentional rewiring might feel strange, like we are trying to change who we are, because our habitual thoughts, feelings, and behaviors have come to feel like us.
In EMDR therapy, the therapist guides the client's eye movements through finger motions as they reflect on a traumatic event. This allows the client to have dual attention (one foot in the present and one foot in the past) to be able to reprocess memories that were stored in the brain in non-adaptive ways.
There is no cure for depression, but many different treatments are available to manage the symptoms. The symptoms of depression vary among individuals. A treatment plan that includes medical interventions, support, and lifestyle changes can enable a person to live a normal and full life with the condition.
Depression is a disorder of the brain. It is a serious mental illness that is more than just a feeling of being "down in the dumps" or "blue" for a few days. For more than 20 million people in the United States who have depression, the feelings persist and can interfere with everyday life.
Such atrophy is centered in a brain region called the hippocampus. This structure plays a critical role in learning and memory, and the magnitude of the hippocampal volume loss (nearly 20% in some reports; refs. 2–4) helps explain some well-documented cognitive deficits that accompany major depression.
Overview. Persistent depressive disorder is a continuous, long-term form of depression. You may feel sad and empty, lose interest in daily activities and have trouble getting things done. You may also have low self-esteem, feel like a failure and feel hopeless.
Treatment-resistant depression (TRD) is a type of major depressive disorder (MDD). It happens when at least two different first-line antidepressants aren't enough to manage the condition during a depressive episode.
Some research suggests that the symptoms of clinical depression can last an average of 10 months if no other mental health conditions are present. But this is not always the case. Because there are different types of depression, symptom duration varies greatly.
If You Do Have to Take Antidepressants Forever, You Will Be OK. Some recent studies suggest long-term antidepressant use may come with side effects previously unknown to scientists. “These risks include an increased risk of gastrointestinal bleeding, especially for SSRI users,” Dr. Hong explained.
If you've only been taking the med for a few weeks, you may be able to reduce it in about a month. Someone coming off antidepressants after 10 years, or a higher dose, might have to gradually reduce their dose for several months.
It is well known that harms caused by SSRIs can be long-lasting [18] and there are indications that they can even be permanent, e.g. for sexual disturbances [39, 40]. Withdrawal symptoms are also drug harms, and they can also persist for a long time [18].
Recovery is possible with appropriate treatment such as exposure therapy, attention training, and a range of anxiety management techniques that can help you manage your symptoms. You can learn the following strategies yourself (using books or taking courses, for example) or you can consult with a trained professional.
Anxiety doesn't really vanish forever. It's just like any other feeling you have—sadness, happiness, frustration, anger, love, and so on. Just like you can't ever eliminate those emotions from your brain, you can't rid anxiety from your brain once and for all.
The sooner you start managing your stress effectively, the easier it will be to keep unexpected stress from causing damage in the future. Luckily, the plasticity of the brain allows it to mold, change, and rebuild damaged areas as you practice new behaviors.