I feel like at some point we're gonna discover depression is basically some kind of inflammatory disease
It makes me wonder if many things might be the other way around. That there's clear physical reasons for many mental or psychological problems.
It's just always easier to claim something is psychogenic when you don't know the cause with hopes that it's enough to placebo the patient to calm down about anything they might be feeling.
When someone, especially a professional claims that whatever you are feeling is psychogenic it feels like a dismissal of what you are feeling. A person is feeling something wrong and essentially they are being told that you are imagining it, and it actually does not matter. Which in a way makes it worse, because not only you are feeling it, you are also being told you are crazy to feel it.
And that there's no hope or solution for it, because you are imagining it, therefore it can't be solved, or you don't know how to solve it in the first place.
I've been able to manage my pains by a combination of lots of aerobic exercising and yoga/stretching type workouts. I'm not in perfect condition yet, but things are certainly better.
I wonder if all or most of depression/anxiety on people is just some physical problem/pain preventing them from sleeping well and bad sleep causing them to feel like shit.
I wouldn't go as far as to say "most" depression/anxiety is caused by lack of sleep, but by now I am certain that a huge amount of undiagnosed or untreated health issues are caused by stuff like inflammation states, lack of sleep, digestion not doing its thing, muscles doing something wrong, and often more than one of these.
I hope you feel better!
Sometimes the cause or treatment might be physical, sometimes it might be mental, because the mental intervention might be just as effective, even with our current poor understanding of the brain.
I don’t know, the reverse that mental diseases don’t cause physical symptoms seems harder to believe.
It all just shows that we don’t take mental health seriously enough.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/medical/somatopsychic
It seems to me that linguistically we talk about "feeling" physically and also "feeling" emotionally because those two things are deeply intertwined.
Covid is absolutely wild.
I feel we are shoving people into crowded public spaces because we currently have no practical alternative
I had PVCs, but only at rest. Completely disappeared with the slightest walk on the treadmill test.
Either Omnicron or a minor cold kicked all this off, plus 2 months of painful heart inflammation that couldn’t be positively diagnosed. During the inflammation, caffeine caused delayed discomfort.
The PVCs caused a lot of discomfort while resting/sleeping and were somehow worse long after exercise.
Cardiac ablation got rid of them.
That is, you wouldn’t tell someone that suffered complex trauma over a long period of time that they have “chronic inflammation” and tell them to take Vitamin D. However, an explanation of chronic inflammation may be more applicable to someone that doesn’t have that history.
To add to this, silos of medical specialties and their associated distinct ways of thinking will impede novel treatments. Any well-paid specialized professional will have a hard time breaking out of their ways of thinking.
That doesn’t imply that depression is a simple result of inflammatory processes, it just shows that depression is a cross-cutting alteration to the body’s function on many levels.
In some cases, depression does result from physical processes in the body going wrong. However, I think too many people try to pin mental health conditions on underlying physical problems that don’t exist. It’s very common for people to want to explain away their depression rather than accept that mental health treatment is the way forward.
When I’m in a depressive state I’m generally eating garbage food, drinking a lot, and not sleeping much (staying up late, but still needing to get up for work). All of this is going to lead to a lot of inflammation and other negative physiological outcomes.
I’m dealing with this right now. I have mild chest pain, and have for weeks. This has happened before, cleaning up my diet, even just for a few days, made it go away.
It’s somewhat a chicken and egg problem to fix though. Mentally, things suck, so I want to keep doing what I’m doing, which causes physical discomfort. Overriding the desire to eat and drink the bad stuff, through sheer force of will, will ultimately alleviate the physical issues, and at the same time clear my my head to some degree… at least until something else pushes me over the edge. When I get pushed back into it, it’s normally just looking for a mental escape from discomfort. If I simply went to sleep instead, I’d probably be all good. I say simply, but that’s always been the hard part for me.
Like, you wouldn’t be surprised that a panic attack causes an actual hormonal response, that will actually cause the heart rate to jump, etc. Why are we surprised that depression causes other symptoms?
Also, it is well documented that when the husband/wife in an elderly couple passes, the other often follows them. Also, will of living greatly corresponds to survival in hospitalized elderly.
it wouldn't be the first disorder where after years of "it's psychological, there is no underlaying physical issue" it turns out that there is an underlying physical problem, see the history of gastric ulcers
Depression seems to be the second type, so I'm not sure it makes sense to talk about that sort of discovery. It seems self evident to me that sometimes depression will be caused by inflammation. Other times it'll be caused by other things. Brains are delicate self modifying machines, they can go haywire from pretty much anything and nothing. We can only find that some factors were underweighted or overweighted by the medical community under some circumstances. Depending on what definition of "depression" gets used.
In his book, Dr. Chris Palmer says “Mental disorders are metabolic disorders of the brain”.