The Link Between Inflammation and Depression?
medium.com
medium.com
It’s not everything, just like antibiotics weren’t everything, but progress here will mean curing an incredible amount of human suffering.
The book linked below, a late 2015 text on Molecular Neuropharmacology, is fascinating. Every chapter has a mention of inflammation and usually ibuprofen. It’s that important.
Particularly fascinating is the connection with ADHD, Parkinson’s, and Schizophrenia. All of the diseases have something to do with dysregulation of Dopamine. In particular, it seems like Ibuprofen helps with reducing the effects of Dopamine overload, which is essentially what Schizophrenia is. It’s an inflammation of the mind that is somewhat similar to how we now think sugar causes harm/inflammation. Anyway this overload eventually can lead to underload, or Parkinson’s. ADHD individuals are often overloaded as well due to the treatment with stimulant medication (which is good but can be abused).
I’m not kidding when I say there are Nobel prizes being left on the table here right now.
https://www.amazon.com/Molecular-Neuropharmacology-Foundatio...
I have no stomach problems unless I drink too much Starbucks coffee over a 3-day period.
Around 3 years on that regimen so far.
I once cracked a rib and my doctor put me on 800 mg ibuprofen twice a day. _All_ pain went away as my swim times dropped steadily - so much so that it was upsetting the swim team's male hierarchy. Each new day I was recovered and invigorated, much to the irritation of my teammates. This went on for a month until the prescription expired. My swim times rose over the next 3 days as swimming became harder and the usual day-to-day pains returned.
Some people say that NSAIDs will prevent you from improving your ability in athletic events but that was not true for me and ibuprofen.
Can’t wait for the science to mature a bit here for better direction. Pain killers (ibuprofen and others) scare the hell out of me now more than ever because they seem like an easy way out (read: temporary solution). And that’s a dark, dark path to tread on.
Inflammation can have chemical roots. It can also be a side effect of infection.
It seems to me that this is why it's so complicated. Correlation does not prove causation. In order to treat conditions associated with inflammation, wecmay need to identify and resolve the things causing the inflammation.
I flirted with diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder to bipolar.
My life was pretty out of control.
I didn’t like the outcomes I saw of people who were on meds their entire life and I didn’t buy the story from mainstream psychiatry.
I found MDMA therapy via an underground practice and it transformed my life over the course of a few session.
I was able to get to the root of all symptoms and heal what was beneath.
Combined with Holotropic Breathwork and NARM / somatic therapy for integration, this approach blew anything the psychiatrists were offering out of the water.
I’ve been experimenting with CBD and it seems to offer and even deeper level of clarity and non-anxiety.
No psychiatric meds, no symptoms and my creative and romantic life now has something to grown from - before this everything was in a constant cycle of boom and bust.
Which is a shame because holy crap the one time I had MDMA sure broke me out of a major depression I'd been in for a couple decades.
It’s not a sanctioned medicine yet, and historically has been outside the bounds of western psychiatry.
And when I mean no psychiatric meds I mean nothing ongoing.
https://maps.org (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies)
Basically the framework I formed looked like this:
Depression and other mental illness are very often caused by an adaptive response to trauma.
Trauma heals in the space of non-ordinary states of conciousness in the right set and setting.
There are numerous paths into non-ordinary states, including psychedelics, EDMR and Breathwork.
Breathwork uses loud rythmic music and hyper ventilation in a supported group context to induce a useful non-ordinary state.
I should say, I thought this was woo woo bs. But holy shit, it will take you on a journey- I was blown away. And also it was super useful to integrate the MDMA sessions.
If so how would you compare their efficacy for your issues
Classic Psychedelics (LSD, DMT, Psilocybin) are useful for generating new information which then needs to be integrated.
MDMA was a much more predictable space to work. Psilocybin tended to take me to deeper as more frightening material - often on the cultural level.
I don’t think I would take psi to work with mania / hypomania; with MDMA it has worked beautiful to create more space to integrate and express the part of myself that was frightening.
That said, I have much more experience w MDMA in a therapeutic setting as an adult, and I could see how Psi could be just as effective.
If there is trauma to be dealt with, I’d personally start with mdma — but again, I’m bias from my personal experience.
Check this video for more details: https://youtu.be/4xbNNxQZEgA
To make myself clear: I think vegan diet is efficient, sustainable and ethical. But there is simply no easy way to go full vegan and get enough macro nutrients (in particular protein, and fats) without getting a lot of sugar. I have a lot of problem with inflammation and even 5g of sugar is too much for me, so it seems like the only plant based food I can eat are soybeans and broccoli. Maybe I'm missing something. Care to help?
I think you'll find you can eat plenty of carbs if you stick to whole grain, unprocessed carbs and also avoid oil. I've been on this diet for two years now and I've lost weight and feel amazing.
You can get enough Omega 3 from non animal sources but if you're worried about it you can supplement with algae-derived Omega 3. Fish get it from algae anyway so you're just cutting out the middle man.
I recommend Michael Greger's book "How Not to Die" for a lot more detail on a healthy plant based diet. I think you'll find it a lot easier to eat this way than you might think.
Consuming refined sugar is inherently unhealthy because it’s consumption causes insulin spikes and eventually insulin desensitization which leads to diabetes which is a strong predictor of inflammation. The same logic applies to any refined foods with concentrated amounts of fat or salt.
No whole plant-based food has the concentrated amount of macronutrients that are in processed food. You could argue that honey might be one, but honey’s been refined from pollen by bees.
You should take into account that some whole plant high sugar or high starch foods like fruits and beans come packaged with fiber and other nutrients as well that serve to balance the nutritional profile and glycemic impact of the food.
That being said, if you do have a problem with sugar, stay away from sweet or high starch foods that lack fiber like ripened bananas and cooked white potatoes. Beans are healthy because they contain resistant starches that act like fiber.
You should be eating a variety of whole plant foods with high fiber and high nurtrient density.
Dr Fuhrmans list of foods you should consume everyday for a healthy immune system. G-BOMBS Greens Beans Onions Mushrooms Berries Seeds
I think it’s also worth mentioning that the carnivore diet is the absolute worst diet imaginable in terms of the environment and animal welfare. It’s a selfish diet for rich people.
The only populations we know of that eat this way have serious athlerosclerois issues and short life spans or, in the case of the Masai, a rare mutation that makes it easier for them to live on this kind of diet.
I bet you can't because they don't exist.
If so the words you write here are but reflective of your beliefs. Which is not gonna help anyone (I'm certainly glad that I did not come across these words while looking to resolve a chronic medical condition).
If you think about it for even five minutes a diet with zero fiber and zero vitamin C makes no sense.
And no wonder you can't cite any specific study I requested for. :P
And then there's all the terrible side effects they never tell you about before you start taking them, and the fact you likely won't be able to stop using them without horrible withdrawal symptoms...
So much about psychiatry is still more akin to shamanism than actual science and medicine it's frightening.
I don't know if you have actually used SSRIs but the stuff about withdrawal is wildly overblown. Believing scare mongering about terrible side-effects and dependence issues kept me severely depressed and is one of the biggest regrets of my life.
So I take a the ibuprofen, and take a break for an a couple hours - and as I noticed the back pain go away - I also noticed a distinct improvement in my mood! I had the exact reaction described in the article "of course, your back doesn't hurt ..duh".
The article makes me wonder if there is another explanation for the mood improvement ..
All of the stuff you mentioned pertains to inflammation. If gut bacteria is disharmonious or not getting enough fiber it consumes intestinal mucous which creates inflammation
Plus we understand so little macro neurochemistry we don't even understand which apparently correlated biomarkers are causal and which are consequential. The same problem exists with other neurological diseases such as Alzheimers. With depression, as it seems to affect higher function, we even have difficulty (and treatment affordances) with non-chemical stimuli.
Still, it's very much worth working on -- people are suffering such serious debilitation.
Sadly so many people in a similar situation don’t have the flexibility, access and/or support to go down the path that I did. Often they will opt out because of the stigma associated with having mental health issues.
The fact that we know so little leaves tons of room for improvement in addressing mental health, but I worry that we have a very long road to giant leaps in addressing mental health unless we can destigmatize mental disabilities (and other neurological conditions)
I also just have to constantly keep busy. I fill my time with work and activities with my family. I rarely take downtime because if I do the dread and flashbacks rear their ugly heads.
I highly recommend you read The Body Keeps The Score. Immensely insightful and well researched book that will change the way you think about overcoming trauma
Having such a bad reaction to it lead me down a wild goose chase toward finding out the way my body processes serotonin ala a gene test, helped me figure out what was causing the depression to begin with.
Another reply here talks about how it seems to be a crapshoot for finding effective drugs and a lot of trial and error. I think that there may be promise in doing drug targeting genetic tests and possibly microbiome sampling as a way to help people avoid the run-around. In my case, knowing this ahead of time would have helped me avoid a lot of suffering and 3 years of obsessively searching for answers.
On the other hand it can take 4-6 weeks to see if someone responds to a drug, and the drug can cause adverse events in addition to not treating the disease
So in this case it is cheaper, faster and safer to take the test before prescribing
The most obvious example of such would be the significant number of people who experience suicidal ideation or commit it/make attempts as a result of going on certain medications.
But at the less extreme end, you're likely looking at least a month or two, more likely 3 or 4 for each medication attempt. That's going on, taking it for long enough to have an effect, going back off, repeat.
With how severe the side effects can be for many, that's enough time to lose a job, fail out of college, etc. And you're asking them to potentially spend years in that cycle to maybe fine something that works.
But harsh side effects seem like they would be acceptable if depression is as problematic as you claim.
Given the well-known addictive nature of most anti-depressants, I have always advised my friends to steer away from them, or wean themselves off, and favor talking therapies instead. Everyone else should do the same.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228550299_The_Emper...
[2] https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
Even for a friend who is severely depressed, which medication will work? How long does each one need to be tried for? What is meant by ‘work’ exactly? Meanwhile, the serious side effects aren’t even fully understood, and you’ll be buying them from companies that actively denied and hid such information from legislators and the public.
Here's a response, using the same data, but getting different results: https://annals-general-psychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles...
> The results reported here conclude the debate on the efficacy of antidepressants and suggest that antidepressants are clearly superior to placebo. They also suggest that baseline severity cannot be utilized to dictate whether the treatment should include medication or not. Suggestions like this, proposed by guidelines or institutions (e.g. the NICE), should be considered mistaken.
[0]Here are links to critiques of both version of Understanding Psychosis: https://www.nationalelfservice.net/mental-health/psychosis/u...
https://www.nationalelfservice.net/mental-health/schizophren...
[1] Here's a link to critiques of PTMFramework https://www.nationalelfservice.net/mental-health/power-threa...
It probably has more to do with a relapse back into depressive symptoms than anything in most cases
My friend has racing thoughts, feeling tired all time, unable to move, unable to think.
Negatives thoughts amplifying to point where nothing no longer makes sense.
Can such depression be treated?
When she was born, she had a serological conflict.
1. She first recognized it at age 8.
2. Now she's 18
3. Tried sucide at 16
It's not like she doesn't want to get better. She has everything good going for her but her body/brain isn't helping her.
Now, this article makes me wonder if she had this depression since birth and only understood it by 8.
And wether she is still affected by antibodies eating out her cells?
Tho i don't have any real sister but she is like my own sister.
I am willing to spend all my money to see her cured from this depression. But nothing has worked so far.
- put her on a strict meat & veggies only diet (without nightshades) - Look into low dose naltrexon therapy, there is a LDN facebook group where you can ask questions.
Oh and of course, visit many doctors and ask them about treatment.
The 6 Causes of Depression: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV5OlaPZ6C4
Also fascinating is a lot of interesting medical knowledge he gathers by reading patent applications.