A learning deficit that may explain why depression is so hard to overcome.
Study tests if depression changes people’s personality.
Study tests if depression changes people’s personality.
People who are depressed become more neurotic, more dependent on others and more thoughtful in the short-term.
After recovering from depression, though, people’s personality returns almost completely to its pre-depression state.
Depression does not change people’s personality in the long-term, the study found.
Indeed, people’s personality may become slightly more healthy after recovering from an episode of depression.
However, depression does affect people’s personality somewhat while they are experiencing an episode.
There was some evidence, though, that people lose some of their social confidence after an episode of depression.
It may also be that multiple, severe bouts of depression can have a long-lasting effect on personality.
The conclusions come from thousands of people, some with and some without depression, who were followed across six years.
The study’s authors explain the results:
“None of the scales for which negative change would be
predicted by the scar hypothesis (increased neuroticism, emotional reliance, and lack of social self-confidence; decreased ascendance/dominance, sociability, and extroversion) showed such change.In general, scores on these scales remained stable from time 1 to time 2; if they changed at all, they changed numerically in the direction of healthier scores at time 2.”
The results showed no evidence of the so-called ‘scar hypothesis’.
The authors explain that…
“…the “scar” or “complication” model, suggesting that the depressive episode is the cause of lasting change in personality.”
Instead, the study supports the idea that certain personality types are vulnerable to depression.
Negative emotionality is the strongest risk factor for depression among personality traits, research finds.
Negative emotionality is essentially being highly neurotic and involves finding it hard to deal with stress and experiencing a lot of negative emotions and mood swings.
People who are neurotic are more likely to experience negative emotions like fear, jealousy, guilt, worry and envy.
The study was published in The American Journal of Psychiatry (Shea et al., 1996).
Could your sleep habits be making you depressed?
From East to West: how being married affects mental health across cultures.
While antidepressants diminish both positive and negative feelings this supplement only lessens negative mood.
Those that made the change were less depressed and anxious as well as feeling less fatigue.
Research uncovers the real effects of music therapy on dementia patients.
A ubiquitous food seasoning paves the way to depression-like behaviour.
The numbers are in: creativity isn’t just for fun, it’s for healing.
A probiotic supplement containing eight different strains was found to reduce depressive symptoms.
A probiotic supplement containing eight different strains was found to reduce depressive symptoms.
A higher dose probiotic supplementation called Vivomixx® has been found to reduce depression and improve the effect of antidepressants.
In the study, when depressed patients took a multi-strain probiotic supplement for a month they saw reductions in their symptoms.
Depression is one of the most common and troublesome mental illnesses which affects millions of people, yet current treatments are inadequate.
Psychotherapy along with medication can help some patients escape the “black dog”, but not everyone.
Studies show that two-thirds of depressed patients don’t respond well enough to antidepressants, thus experts are still looking for more options to improve current treatments or find better ones.
One treatment approach is targeting the microbiota-gut-brain (MGB) axis to make existing drugs more efficient and lower depression.
The brain and the digestive system have a two-way relationship, which is known as the gut-brain axis.
In other words, what you eat affects how you think and what you think also affects how your digestion works.
Depressed patients generally have more digestive disorders and a greater gut bacteria imbalance.
Research suggests that if the intestinal flora of depressed people is imitated in mice then they show symptoms of depression like fatigue, lack of interest, and sadness.
This indicates that microbiota composition influences the central nervous system through the gut-brain axis.
Probiotics can stimulate the gut-brain axis and potentially improve mood and brain function (Ranuh et al., 2019).
Moreover the current study shows that probiotics can improve the effects of antidepressants, leading to better outcomes.
In this study, patients with depression took a probiotic supplement called Vivomixx®, which contains eight specific strains providing 900 billion CFU per day for one month.
The results showed a great improvement in patients’ mood as well as changes in the composition of their intestinal flora.
However, the positive health effects caused by probiotics reduced when the supplementation stopped.
Ms Anna-Chiara Schaub, the study’s first author, said:
“It may be that four weeks of treatment is not long enough and that it takes longer for the new composition of the intestinal flora to stabilize.”
Related research:
The study was published in the journal Translational Psychiatry (Schaub et al., 2022).
Join the free PsyBlog mailing list. No spam, ever.
