Nigel 
July 7th, 2009Now there’s a million pound question.
Clinical depression is something wrong with the chemistry in your brain. That is the end result. The question is: what causes that chemical fault? It could be one of several things – or more likely a mixture of several.
This is one reason why psychiatry is such a challenging field. There are just so many factors that need taking into account. I’ll try to take you through them. What I say will inevitably be biased by my own experiences.
I got it from my parents
My father on the mend 1975
Depression, or at least a pre-disposition to it, can be inherited from our parents. My father suffered from what seems to have been a form of depression very similar to my own. I’ve been told I had a one in four chance of inheriting some major mental illness from him, although it needn’t have been the same as his. My sister was lucky. Me, I beat the odds. My parents didn’t intend me to be born as I am and they gave me a lot of good things along with the depression, so I’m not complaining. It is reasonably certain that from time to time my body fouls up how it handles its own brain chemistry. It may even be that occasionally it fires chemical messengers into my blood stream telling things they are to behave differently, and the resulting changes are highly inconvenient for a human trying to function normally in society.
My own condition has been likened to that of a hedgehog. In the autumn chemical messengers inside the hedgehog tell its body the time has come to hibernate, so its brain starts up a process of shutting the body down for the big winter sleep. That is certainly how it feels, and my annual depression has usually (though not always) kicked off in the autumn. Once depressed it feels like my body is trying hard to hibernate. I sleep more. I feel very lethargic. My physical strength and stamina wane. When I had to go to work as a teacher it was often a major effort to get going, and part of the way I reacted without wishing to was by becoming very prickly, very bad tempered, seriously narrow minded and rigid in my thinking. If you find a hibernating hedgehog and prod it with a stick repeatedly until it has to wake up then you’d better be using a long stick.
Once the brain chemistry is disturbed like this it takes time for it to recover. It may require other things too. A suitable medication or perhaps electrical treatment may help. These days thankfully psychiatrists rarely cut open the skulls of their patients. They can’t take samples in order to identify the exact chemical problem. That’s one reason why finding the right medication at the right dosage can be trial and error.
Depression can start with changes inside your physical body.
I’ve got a right to be depressed
Some events are so traumatic and stressful that they naturally leave us feeling down. If we fail at something important to us, or find we have a serious illness, or we had a distorted childhood, or we’re made redundant, or someone close to us dies, then there’s something wrong if we carry on as normal. It takes time to adapt, and in that time we may experience the symptoms of depression including losing the energy to do things, losing interest in much of life, and feeling like life may not be worth living.
For an adolescent being thrown about already by turbulent hormones this bad event can appear trivial to an outsider; to the young person inside the experience it probably feels as if life is ending.
It is normal to feel down for a few days, maybe even a week or two at a time. That’s part of life. The problem is that if we let these emotions continue for too long they start to distort our brain chemistry. We begin the slide into severe clinical depression.
How we cope with the events of life is affected by how we think. For instance we might have got into the habit of saying destructive things to ourselves, we may have unrealistic beliefs about life which could do with being examined, we may be unable to cope with bad memories. or we may just never have developed effective skills for solving problems.
Depression can start with stuff going around you.
Quick and dirty summary
Sometimes depression is caused by the chemistry of the brain changing, and this is experienced as depression.
Sometimes life makes us feel down for so long that how we feel starts to change the chemistry in our brain.
Whether the chemical changes are the cause or the result we end up ill. Treatment is likely to require professional help, time, and a variety of different approaches.
Watch this blog for more. Here are some words and phrases that link to where I’m going with this: counselling methods, types and methods of counselling, medication, ECT, SAD, habits, addiction, the idea of a subconscious mind, people who can help, how to help.
