Chronic adversity dampens dopamine production
elifesciences.org
elifesciences.org
In other words, the chronically stressed individuals had a different response to stress, which involved less dopamine production than that of their less stressed peers. It’s not clear how much of this is actually a negative adaption, as opposed to just being a different way of responding.
It’s also important to consider the context provided by the researchers in the article:
“This study can’t prove that chronic psychosocial stress
causes mental illness or substance abuse later in life by
lowering dopamine levels,” Dr Bloomfield cautions. “But we
have provided a plausible mechanism for how chronic stress
may increase the risk of mental illnesses by altering the
brain’s dopamine system.”
This study is still pretty cool though, because it does point us in a general direction. It can help explain why some mental illnesses like schizophrenia have strong genetic components, yet also environmental factors like childhood abuse. As you said, the reduced dopamine could be a good thing. But maybe in a genetic minority it creates a neuro-chemical downward spiral. Maybe we could prevent the development of schizophrenia by prescribing medication following trauma. Who knows. It opens a lot of doors.
Not everyone can afford this, whereas pills can actually be covered by insurance.
And even qualified people can be dead wrong. For example it's really hard to find competent help for adult high-functioning asperger spectrum depression patients (I've witnessed this).
Talking therapies already scale just fine, as you say the therapist is paid well and the people that actually need them are a vast minority. If they become the vast majority (where you would actually need to scale), something is systematically wrong somewhere else and that needs to be addressed outside of therapy.
About 17M adult Americans have had one or more major depressive episodes. 35% of them received no treatment at all. That's just the numbers for depression, let alone other disorders.
The pills can treat symptoms but they don't resolve the root causes of the disorders. I think there are a lot of people out there who would benefit from more or better treatment but the latent demand greatly outweighs the supply.
It is just another thing a lot of people do to cope with stress, pain, unhappiness etc.
In some ways it's effective, unfortunately it can also come with a lot of nasty side effects like hangovers, damaged relationships, etc.
When you view alcohol as a medication you can then compare it to other medications. The pharmaceutical antidepressants, anxiolytics etc. are far from perfect, but they almost universally have less dangerous side effects than heavy alcohol usage. If someone's using alcohol to cope there's nothing intrinsically immoral or shameful about that, but if the side effects are manifesting there's probably a better medication out there.
I wish I found this 20 years ago.
Simple things like keeping my house clean are no longer a planned, forced, prolonged effort. It just happens.
I'm happy for you the you made the discovery and found treatment. It's wild how subversive and destructive it can be.
> “This study can’t prove that chronic psychosocial stress causes mental illness or substance abuse later in life by lowering dopamine levels,” Dr Bloomfield cautions. “But we have provided a plausible mechanism for how chronic stress may increase the risk of mental illnesses by altering the brain’s dopamine system.”
I wonder how people would game that in order to increase their chances of admission.
The concept of intersectionality seems to be an attempt to measure chronic adversity using oppressed identities as a proxy. It could theoretically be replaced by a more direct, objective measure like this.
There will always be bad actors in any system, and its still worth having aid programs even though a few people take advantage of them, but there needs to be serious checks and balances first.
TLDR; college organizations can't be trusted to audit themselves so we need a combination of government regulation with teeth, consumer advocacy, and full transparency, in order to achieve the best outcome of an initiative such as an adversity score.
The reason likely being twofold - Access/Knowledge of the system, as well as a pressure to improve their marks.
I.e. These private schools make their name and are in many ways partially paid for by parents because it promises better marks than sending them to public schools.
So they use every trick they have to get special dispensations and raise student's marks, leading to the bulk of these extra marks and time going to the wealthier, privileged areas.
As well as that, note that I'm not saying that all of these students are necessarily cheating by doing this, many of these students have their own problems (though many didn't too!) but the access and knowledge of how to use the system is also a part of being privileged.
Which is clearly true.
I mean, I'm married to a lady who went to a private school. I wish she was rich.
The point was, adding concessions to a system often exacerbates the gap between poor and everyone else, which is not what people would necessarily expect.
I suspect that all this had something to do with how little support I was able to get from them when I was applying for colleges in 2007. The stresses they were experiencing - stresses which were, in their intensity, in that moment in history, largely the domain of people of color - had material effects on my ability to make my case to America's higher education system. They had too much on their plate to help me, and no one knew anything was the matter because we were a middle class family headed by parents with professional or advanced degrees. None of the colleges knew that I was dealing with that - and my sexuality, and the divorce, and depression, and body dysphoria - as I groped my way blindly through the process, alone, high SAT score and decent GPA from a STEM magnet program in hand.
My final choice and subsequent experience were resultingly lackluster, in hindsight, and if someone involved in the process had known, maybe I could have made better decisions. All this is, is acknowledging the subtractive and deleterious effects some circumstances can have on this most important of tasks, and taking action; in America, the simple experiencing of racial animus is one of those circumstances, no matter how much portions of the country harrumph about level playing fields and the past being the past. Here, friends: look up, and see how the light of 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago glints off the present.
But, I'm not exactly sure what your point is.
To put it a way most guys here will understand: how much more money does a 5'4" man have to make to get the same social and professional consideration as a 6'2" man? Identity is not destiny, but at the same time, you'd be forgiven for getting that impression from a glance at American society.
In certain countries, I'm sure this is the case. In western countries I don't think so.
And upvoted so you can get that sweet dopamine hit.
When most people self-diagnose as “low dopamine” or refer to addictive behaviors as a “dopamine hit”, they’re not exactly referring to hard science. Yes, dopamine is involved in motivational reward and anticipatory behavior and dopamine is also key to the rewarding aspects of certain drugs, but the reward system is much more complicated than a single chemical messenger. For example, the opioid system plays an important role in reward as well.
In terms of treating addiction disorders, understanding the fine details of neurotransmitters and reward pathways in the brain isn’t as relevant to therapy as you might hope. The high level concepts and therapeutic methods for changing people’s behavior don’t really depend on understanding how dopamine or serotonin operate in the brain.
For example, with internet addiction it’s important to enable people to understand why they are spending so much time on the internet. You need to give them the tools to recognize their behavior, perform some introspection, and intentionally take action to make different choices about how they spend their time. Relating this back to dopamine or reward systems is only really useful as a tool to make these mental models stick with the patients. If they feel a sense of understanding, they’re more likely to feel a sense of control over their actions, and in turn more likely to take action to change that behavior.
On the other hand, talking to it is not likely to help either, although you may work out some of your own issues.
We already know what happens when you don’t have enough dopamine (Parkinson’s disease - dopamine analogues are used to treat it) and too much dopamine (schizophrenia - dopamine blockers are used to treat it). Saying more is better is a major over simplification.
Dopamine is involved in a number of different neural structures that all have different effects. Not to mention there are several dopamine receptors subtypes that all have different actions.
I don't think you can build a biochemical model of internet addiction as it differs on what the content you are addicted to is. Some people can frequently check up on new recipes or different news forums and others don't at all. It can differ per topic per person. Instagram does nothing for me but means a lot to some women.
Dopamine was used in the past few years to support various reasoning around behaviour and in turn justify stories about behaviour. It was closer to spiritual than scientific.
Symptoms that suck which adderall doesn’t fix is OCD (brain looping on stuff), amphetamine caused anxiety (rarely but it sucks), and depression.
Steam room at my gym and hard exercise helps a lot. Need 8 hours of sleep. Intermittent fasting in the AM. Caffeine is a hard dial to set right.
Of interest though is that the causality does run the other direction, with those who have ADHD at a higher risk of incidence for psychosocial trauma and development of PTSD subsequent to traumatic events.
First google result: https://www.dandelionchocolate.com/2015/09/14/caffeine-and-c...
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-2621....
Like what's the bar for "low dopamine" with ADHD being identified as root cause? What type of doctor would do such a diagnosis?
Asking as I identify with the symptoms, but no idea where to start to check them.
Focusing on dopamine to try to predict negative outcomes seems weird here. Sounds like a just as viable title could be "people who have been through real adversity don't get stressed in trivial situations where someone calls them names"
Which dogma are you discussing?
The other dogma, evident from the down votes and comments, is that there is no dogma in this community.
I think that’s probably plausible, but it’s sort of besides the point because I there is no reason to believe that we can ever know this fate until it’s happened. Granted, in some contexts we are allowed to know this “fate”, and this context can just be replaced with “science”, or “the predictable things we know about our world”.
So bearing this all this in mind, if we took your idea even further - all the way to full on pre-destiny - I don’t see how it should change anything about our current world.
Basically, you might be right that there’s some kind of great master race sleeping amongst the rest of us, but it’s not really something that you get to “know”. Probably this dogma you speak of that people hold on to is because it’s just as plausible to believe in hard work as fate and no one really knows what to do, or else we’d all do it.
I’d add that even assuming that we can quantify birthrite to begin with, not to mention success, is basically starting from a false predicate. The world is manifold, shit happens, and any attempt to try and turn this stuff into inputs and outputs isn’t intellectually honest.
I find THAT more interesting than why an article could get upvotes but the discussion might be delayed.
We all have biases. For example, when I read people who talk a lot about being fearful of contradicting community dogma, I tend to anticipate that they will be... Men who lean towards conspiracy theories involving women, minorities, and "the left" being in control of society and forming "witch hunts" and "mob justice," not to mention "cancelling people for wrongthink."
Of course, that has absolutely no bearing on who you may be and what you may believe. Recognizing my biases is the first step towards banishing them.
I believe you were speaking to the dogma of the privileged SV coder elite, which you were fearful of.
This study in particular though is very well done, just publishing striatal dopamine and hopefully we'll see more studies like this in the future to piece it together.