What Causes Clinical Depression In The Brain
Some people experience depression during a serious medical illness.
What causes clinical depression in the brain. The hippocampus amygdala and prefrontal cortex. The result may be emotional flooding persistently negative views of oneself and the world hopelessness and depressed mood. Signals are sent through the brain and in fact the entire nervous system by special chemicals called neurotransmitters. There are three parts of the brain that appear to play a role in mdd.
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. There is some debate concerning the causes of depression. Serotonin which regulates mood emotion and sleep. It s still not clear however whether inflammation causes depression or vice versa.
Research suggests that depression doesn t spring from simply having too much or too little of certain brain chemicals. So clinical depression major depressive disorder is caused by a number of different factors but the bottom line is that in patients with depression the brain is inadequately equipped to process negative emotions. Many pharmaceutical companies just use the people s misconceptions about the illness to their advantage. In people with depression the levels of certain brain chemicals are thought to be out of balance particularly these neurotransmitters.
However no research in the past actually came to this conclusion. Neurotransmitters are naturally occurring brain chemicals that likely play a role in depression. You might have heard that depression stems from a chemical imbalance and that s partly true. With most drugs that aim to treat depression they advertise that low levels of serotonin in one s brain actually cause depression.
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. Rather there are many possible causes of depression including faulty mood regulation by the brain genetic vulnerability stressful life events medications and medical problems. On the one hand it is considered a physiological disorder of the brain. No one knows exactly what causes it but it can occur for a variety of reasons.
Depression is an extremely complex disease.