Where does depression come from? Why is it classified as a disease?
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It is an imbalance in the chemicals in your brain. It is not just sadness. You can’t just get over it. That would be like telling a diabetic to get over it.
It is a disease like diabetes is a disease due to the imbalance of insulin.
Why wouldn’t it be classified as a disease? When your pancreas stops producing hormones it’s classified as a disease; when your brain stops making neurotransmitters, how is that any different?
It’s a disease because it has a large negative impact on the patient’s life.
The “chemical imbalances” thing isn’t baseless, but it’s not as complete a picture as people like to imply it is.
I’m not sure why people are so insistent on the chemical imbalance idea. Maybe it’s because they’re worried people won’t perceive it as a “real illness”, maybe it’s because it lets them pretend that exercise and eating well wouldn’t help.
Depression generally starts from sadness, and then it causes itself.
For instance, say your dog died. You get sad, call in sick for a couple days at work and neglect your college schoolwork a bit. You also haven’t cleaned your house in that time frame.
During the time it’d take to fix your schoolwork, you’re also trying to pick up extra hours at your job to make up for those lost days. Unfortunately, you are losing a TON of sleep, your house is getting worse, and it’s making you incredibly anxious. The lack of sleep impacts your schoolwork and your work ethic, and you slip behind again.
This happens repeatedly, because our world isn’t very kind to those who can’t keep up. I mean, the only difference between me and a homeless person is that I can afford to pay my rent this month.
Establishing it as a disease is actually incredibly helpful to our society, since it’s something that often needs an outside influence before it gets resolved, and it’s something that can often get substantially worse.
When a person experiences a problem with the expected function of some part of their body, we call that a disease. That includes the brain.
Depression refers to a condition where an issue with the brain causes a person to feel extreme sadness, helplessness, or rejection. In depression, the feeling is far more extreme than the sort of typical emotional responses people have as a result of social interactions. Depression is more intense, and doesn’t rely social interaction to cause it (though that can certainly make it worse). It can very much make it difficult for a person to function.
What causes depression is quite complex. It had originally been thought to be related to abnormalities in the function of certain chemicals in the brain, and that certainly does play a part, but current understanding is that is also partially the result of a combination of biological, genetic, environmental, and psychological factors.
Drugs that treat depression largely focus on altering the function of chemicals called neurotransmitters in the brain.
ELI5: There is sadness that can happen from various processes and functions in your brain. Sometimes parts of the brain isn’t working quite right and those processes are either over active, active for too long, or active when it doesn’t need to be (or in some cases the processes that gives relief from it isn’t working well). If it continually happens to the point that it hinders or causes negative impact to the rest of the organism then it moves into the category of being a disease.
Boiled down, anytime any organ is not functioning correctly to the point of causing negative impact it is considered a disease. Diseases of course have varying severity. The brain is just a very complex organ that when it doesn’t behave properly can affect your thoughts, reasoning, emotions, feelings and the rest of your body.
It’s that clinical depression isn’t just sadness. There are many clinical features that you could break down into three parts; somatic, mood and cognitive
Mood seems obvious, and it must mean feeling sad/depressed, but sometimes it’s just feeling nothing, being flat. Not getting enjoyment from things you did enjoy. But also worthlessness and hopelessness (hopelessness is a really worrying thing and is a big thing when assessing risk of suicide)
Somatic symptoms are the physical types things; lack of appetite, weight loss of gain (might have bouts of eating excessively and high calorie stuff so potentially get weight gain), lack of energy, sleep disturbances of various kinds
You then get to cognitive. This can be loss of interest in thing you enjoy (compared to wanting to do something but then not getting enjoyment from it), lack of concentration. Slowing of thoughts. Obsessive thoughts connected with the depression. At its most severe you can get depressive delusions and hallucinations. These would be fitting with the depression mood, so things like believing you are dead or seeing yourself rotting when you look in the mirror (extreme examples or an extreme symptom but you get the idea).
When you add all these factors together you can see the difference between feeling sad and an illness
But you then look at causes. Most people with depression will probably be a multi factorial reason. So likely has some genetic/biological susceptibility and then gets trigger but a bad event and it doesn’t really resolve when that event happens, or something along those lines.You then have people who life is shit, everything is going wrong, and you can see why they would be depressed, it’s probably a normal reaction. There are some people where is origin seems to be entirely or largely biological. There are no obvious triggers, no reason for mood to drop.
I hope by me explaining it extensively can show why the term depression can be used for something thought of as a disease. Hope it helps
TL;DR: a disease/disorder is when something in the human body isn’t working how it’s supposed to and it’s negatively impacting the person. Depression is exactly that.
Whether it’s breathing, eating/digestion, moving around, or our moods and emotions, there isn’t a single process in the human body that isn’t controlled by some combination of chemical and electrical signals.
Clinical depression is considered a disease/disorder because it’s a situation where those chemical and electrical signals that are supposed to regulate mood are not firing off along the proper pathway.
Because of those issues with the signal pathway, a person either experiences sadness in situations where they normally wouldn’t or experiences way more sadness than would be appropriate in situations where they might only need to be a little sad. Either case can take a toll and really impact someone’s quality of life.
Depression can have many causes and can be described on a variety of levels. There’s a neurological level, a biological level, a physiological, behavioral, social even nutritional one and I probably forgot one. And they all interact, turning it into a spiral that makes depression the difficult mental health issue that it is.
The causes can be different, it can be anything from medical (a tumor) to lack of nutrients/vitamins to anything external (traumatic experience, drug use, lack of emotional resources, lifer chanhing events, denying ones needs, tough times, lack of social support etc.)
It’s helpful to view depression as the body and mind shutting down.
And its helpful to take the system of needs, drives and reward to describe what depression is. Our needs are important signals of what we need to survive, our drive allowes us to get what we need, our reward systems rewards us for using our drive to serve our needs.
Now, depression acts on our needs, drive and reward system. Meaning, during depressive episodes people experience decreased needs, lack of drive and experience little satisfaction from whatever they do.
This doesnt affect just things like working, reading or meetinf peope. It can affect very basic needs like hunger, too.
And this is not just an experience of the mind. The body lacks energy, is tired as well.
All of those processes turn into a loop that can make it difficult to get out of it.
The more depressed one is, the less they have the energy and resources to get out of depression, with suicidal thoughts at the very extreme end of it. And its not that people necessarily want to die, they just dont want to live – this might not make sense for some but it does to most who have experienced a certain level of depression.
And because of all those effects it can have, mentally and physically it is a disease. Because it really can make people unable to live their life and function in society.
You have a chemical reward system in your brain that subconciously motivates you to eat, sleep, work, learn, excercise, love and be loved, etc. Most people get doses of these happy chemicals to the brain as a result of performing those tasks, and so they fall into a routine of doing the things, and then feeling good about it (or atleast good enough to go to sleep and do it again).
And endless list of factors all tied in to our physical health and life experiences can mess up these motivation/reward systems in different ways. Not enough nuerotransmitters getting to the brain causes apathy or hopelessness. Too much of some can cause anxiety, fear, or anger, and others can cause brain fog and memory issues. Everyone is different, and some people can experience all of those feelings in the same day.
Edit:typo
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