Review of 29 studies concludes: Depression is not just a mental disorder

PSYBlog
Tue, 08 Mar 2016 18:41 UTC

3,961 people from 29 different studies were included in the analysis.

Depression is more than a mental disorder, it affects the body's ability to detoxify itself.

It should be seen as a systematic disease that affects the whole body, argues a new study in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

Accepting that depression affects the whole body could help explain why people experiencing depression are more likely to suffer from cancer, cardiovascular disease and to die younger.

All of these problems can be combated, however, by the usual treatments for depression: talk therapy and/or medication.

The conclusions come from examining the results of 29 previous studies.

These looked at how depression affected the bodies of 3,961 people in different ways.

The studies consistently found that depression was linked to oxidative stress in the body.

Comment: Psychoneuroimmunology: How inflammation affects your mental health

Psychoneuroimmunology. This is what I aim to practice. Medical terms of this length command our respect for the interconnectedness of different subspecialties, for the futile segmentation and compartmentalization of the body into different organ systems.

As discussed in this previous article I wrote for Dr. Mercola, deconstructing the serotonin model of depression, psychiatry is in a crisis. It can no longer stand on its own, throwing more and more medications at its perceived target.

It seems, therefore, fitting that psychiatry would follow the investigative path of other lifestyle-triggered chronic diseases such as cancer, autoimmunity, and heart disease. There already exists a bidirectional relationship between all of the major chronic diseases and psychiatric diagnoses (patients who struggle with chronic diseases are more likely to be depressed and vice versa).

In this model, depression is a non-specific fever that tells us little about what is actually causing the body to react and protect itself in this way. The body is "hot" and we need to understand why. Depressive symptoms are the manifestation of many downstream effects on hormones and neurotransmitters, but if we swim up to the source, we will find a river of inflammatory markers coursing by.

The source itself may be singularly or multiply-focused as stress, dietary, and toxic exposures, and infection, as we will discuss here. As explored in the medical literature,¹inflammation appears to be a highly relevant determinant of depressive symptoms such as flat mood, slowed thinking, avoidance, alterations in perception, and metabolic changes.

Oxidative stress refers to an imbalance in the body which hurts its ability to get rid of toxic substances.

The researchers found that after normal treatment, the body recovers relatively quickly.

After successful treatment, the bodies of people who were formerly depressed are virtual indistinguishable from healthy people in terms of oxidative stress.

The study was published in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry (Jiménez-Fernández et al., 2015).

Comment: New View of Depression: An Ailment of the Entire Body

Scientists are increasingly finding that depression and other psychological disorders can be as much diseases of the body as of the mind.

People with long-term psychological stress, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder tend to develop earlier and more serious forms of physical illnesses that usually hit people in older age, such as stroke, dementia, heart disease and diabetes. Recent research points to what might be happening on the cellular level that could account for this.

"As we learn more...we will begin to think less of depression as a 'mental illness' or even a 'brain disease,' but as a systemic illness," says Owen Wolkowitz, a psychiatry professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who along with colleagues has conducted research in the field.