Faith G. Harper - This Is Your Brain on Depression: Creating a Path to Getting Better

THis is your brain on Depression

Creating Your Path to Getting Better

Part of the 5 Minute Therapy Series

Dr. Faith Harper, 2016, 2018

This edition Microcosm Publishing, 2018

First edition, first published 2016

Second edition, first published December 10, 2018

ISBN 978-1-62106-146-5

This is Microcosm #281

Cover illustration by Trista Vercher

Inside covers by Sophie Crumb

Book design by Joe Biel

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Contents

1. WHAT IS DEPRESSION?

D epression is a MOTHERFUCKER.

Lets just put that shit right out there. And may it serve as fair warning for how I roll, language-wise, as an author: I think fuck is a perfectly cromulent word.

Depression is one of those words we throw around and use as a label so indiscriminately its lost its meaning. Ive been guilty of it. Maybe you have, too.

I used the word depressed to express how I felt when Whole Foods stopped carrying my favorite ginger cookies, even though pissed as fuck with a preposterous sense of entitlement would have been a way better description of my state of mind.

Check out your social media account and someone is stating theyre depressed because they had Morrissey tickets and he canceled the show (and seriously, he always cancels the show; you are not only not depressed , you should also be not surprised ).

Depression is not your team losing in overtime, losing your favorite watch, getting fired, or breaking up with a partner. Granted, all of these things have different levels of suckitude, but at their core they are all losses that cause understandable levels of grief. Grief and loss can absolutely be traumatic and can absolutely lead to depression. But with proper space and time to heal from grief, we heal. Depression is a far more insidious problem, and sometimes it doesnt have anything to do with an identifiable loss.

What is depression? Depression is a biochemical learned helplessness response to stress . Depression is the bodys way of saying nothing I do is going to help anyway, it all sucks ass no matter what .

In this way, depression is a lot like anxiety. Anxiety is a biochemical over-response to stress hormones. Its the body trying to go into survival mode to protect itself, based on what it thinks to be true.

Robert Sapolsky, the brilliant stress researcher who wrote Why Zebras Dont Get Ulcers , defines depression as a genetic-neurochemical disorder requiring a strong environmental trigger whose characteristic manifestation is an inability to appreciate sunsets.

I define it as a clinical case of the fuck-its.

Depression is not the same thing as sadness, grief, coping with trauma, or coping with loss, although depression can have its onset in any of those things. Depression is the complete shutdown of all the things that make being human a joyful experience. Depression is the body saying if nothing I do makes any difference, there is no point in enjoying ANYTHING .

The biggest, most consistent symptom of depression is anhedonia , which is a tongue-twister way of saying an inability to feel pleasure . If you look at that word, you can see it essentially means not-hedonistic. If you struggle with depression, you have all kinds of feels. Guilt, shame, anger, irritability, hopelessness, overwhelming grief. But you rarely have experiences of pleasure, gratitude, connectedness, and joy. And if you do reach out for them, you feel them snatched away more often than not. Depression is the thief of all the wonderful things that make human-ing worth it.

The word depression comes from the Latin root deprimere, which means to press down. Yup, exactly. Depression operates like a French press... but instead of getting coffee out of the smashed-down grounds, you get a depleted and wrung-out human being.

2. WHAT TRIGGERS DEPRESSION?

W hy do some people end up with depression? Fancy researcher types dont actually know. I mean, not really. We have a pretty good idea that there is a significant genetic predisposition to depression and are pretty certain that an environmental trigger is also required .

This means if we are talking about the infamous nature versus nurture question, the answer is yes, both. In order to develop depression, you will likely need both the brain wiring (because it runs in your family) and some fucked-up shit to trigger the disease actually kicking in. You know, like trauma . (Im a trauma therapist; Im always seeming to go there.)

So when we are talking about nature versus nurture, a better way to think of it is as nurture informing nature.

Very little of our genetic programming is set in stone. Only 25% of all diseases are related to a single faulty gene. Many, many, many diseases, however, are lurking in our DNA and can be turned on by the right conditions. The super fancy term for this is epigenetics .

If depression runs in your family, it could be because of epigenomes that were turned on in your parents or grandparents by traumas they experienced. Then these genetic changes passed down to you. So, you were born with the wiring for depression. And if their history was bad enough, or enough bad things got piled onto you, then you are far, far more likely than other people to struggle with depression.

In a practical sense, this means your brain is wired for neurotransmitter misfiring. Lemme bust out the science for a minute.

So, nerve cells in the brain, called neurons, have to communicate with one another to accomplish any shit you gotta do in your pursuit of human-ing.

Dont be put off by the word neuron even if it sounds like Im about to science you into a coma. Neuron truly only means nerve cell. These transmit, receive, and process information throughout the body. Think of neurons as a group of gossips that have some hot dirt they want to snark about.