Category: Depression

Current antidepressants take around 3 to 8 weeks to kick in and only help around 50% of people who are depressed.

A new type of antidepressant holds the promise of treating depression quickly, without too many side-effects.

Professor Scott Thompson, of the University of Maryland School of Medicine who led the research, said:

“Our results open up a whole new class of potential antidepressant medications.

We have evidence that these compounds can relieve the devastating symptoms of depression in less than one day, and can do so in a way that limits some of the key disadvantages of current approaches.”

Currently used antidepressants, such as Prozac and Lexapro, target levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin.

Unfortunately they are only effective in around half of people with depression.

Even amongst people they do help, it can take three to eight weeks for the effects can be felt.

For patients who are suicidal, this period can be excruciating.

Also, many now believe that targeting serotonin is not effective (see: Long-Held Belief About Depression Challenged by New Study).

The new compounds focus on another neurotransmitter with the acronym GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid), instead of serotonin.

GABA mainly reduces brain activity in certain key areas related to mood.

The new class of compounds dampen down these inhibitory signals.

Theoretically, the result should be to lift mood.

Professor Thompson explained that preliminary tests on animals have been encouraging:

“These compounds produced the most dramatic effects in animal studies that we could have hoped for.

It will now be tremendously exciting to find out whether they produce similar effects in depressed patients.

If these compounds can quickly provide relief of the symptoms of human depression, such as suicidal thinking, it could revolutionize the way patients are treated.”

The study found that the compounds only affected the brains of stressed rats and left unstressed rats unchanged.

This may mean that the side-effects of the treatment will be less severe than those seen for current antidepressants.

The study was published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology (Fischell et al., 2015).

Image credit: sophiadphotography

New approach to cause of depression may help treatment using established therapies.

It’s often assumed that it’s depression that causes a pessimistic view of the future.

But it could be the other way around, a new study finds.

Being pessimistic about the future may actually cause depression.

Professor Martin Seligman and Ann Marie Roepke reviewed the research on prospection.

Prospection refers to how we think about the future.

Their conclusions are published in the British Journal of Clinical Psychology (Roepke & Seligman, 2015).

They find that there are three ways in which thinking about the future may cause depression:

• Poor generation of possible futures.
• Poor evaluation of possible future.
• Negative beliefs about the future.

Depression also likely feeds back into more negative views of the future, creating a vicious circle.

Fortunately, these types of thinking can be addressed by talk therapies such as cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT).

The study’s authors write:

“Prospection belongs front and centre in the study of depression.

Laboratory studies are needed to confirm that faulty prospection does drive depression and to help us determine how prospection can be improved.

We hope clinical scientists will invest in research on prospection to shed more light on a crucial and underappreciated process that may underlie much more than depression.

An understanding of how prospection shapes psychopathology may enable researchers to create more effective treatments and help distressed individuals to create brighter futures.”

Depressed woman image from Shutterstock

How four weeks of probiotic supplementation can help stop a sad mood getting worse.

Probiotics may stop sadness turning into depression by helping people let go of the past, a new study finds.

Researchers at the Leiden Institute of Brain and Cognition found that probiotics stopped people ruminating so much.

Rumination is when people focus on bad experiences and feelings from the past.

Dr Laura Steenbergen, the study’s first author, said:

“Rumination is one of the most predictive vulnerability markers of depression.

Persistent ruminative thoughts often precede and predict episodes of depression.”

In the study 40 people were given a sachet to take with water or milk every day for four weeks.

Half of the people received sachets that contained a multispecies probiotic.

The other half received a placebo for the four weeks.

Before and afterwards people’s so-called ‘cognitive reactivity’ was measured.

‘Cognitive reactivity’ is the extent to which a sad mood can turn into something more serious.

The authors explained the results:

“…in the probiotics supplementation condition participants perceived themselves to be less distracted by aggressive and ruminative thoughts when in a sad mood.”

In other words, when people felt sad, those taking the probiotics ruminated less.

The authors write:

“…studies have shown that the tendency to engage in ruminative thoughts is sufficient to turn mood fluctuations into depressive episodes, and that individuals who typically respond to low mood by ruminating about possible causes and consequences of their state have more difficulties in recovering from depression.”

Probiotics have been increasingly linked to good mental health.

But this is the first study to identify this specific link.

Dr Lorenza Colzato, another of the study’s authors, said:

“Even if preliminary, these results provide the first evidence that the intake of probiotics may help reduce negative thoughts associated with sad mood.

As such, our findings shed an interesting new light on the potential of probiotics to serve as adjuvant or preventive therapy for depression.”

The research is published in the journal  Brain, Behavior, and Immunity (Steenbergen et al., 2015).

Sad woman image from Shutterstock

Facebook use linked to depression by new research, but particular psychological process could be the cause.

Comparing yourself to other people on Facebook has been linked to depressive symptoms, a new study finds.

While the social network can be a useful way of connecting with others, there may be psychological dangers.

Mai-Ly Steers, the study’s first author, said:

“One danger is that Facebook often gives us information about our friends that we are not normally privy to, which gives us even more opportunities to socially compare.

You can’t really control the impulse to compare because you never know what your friends are going to post.

In addition, most of our Facebook friends tend to post about the good things that occur in their lives, while leaving out the bad.

If we’re comparing ourselves to our friends’ ‘highlight reels,’ this may lead us to think their lives are better than they actually are and conversely, make us feel worse about our own lives.”

Surveys of over 300 people found that the more time people spent on Facebook, the greater their depressive symptoms.

However, people who spent more time comparing themselves with others were more depressed.

For people who used Facebook a lot but spent less time comparing themselves with others, the link to depression was not as strong.

Ms Steers said:

“It doesn’t mean Facebook causes depression, but that depressed feelings and lots of time on Facebook and comparing oneself to others tend to go hand in hand.”

Fascinatingly, it didn’t matter how people were comparing themselves.

For example, it may be depressing to compare yourself to someone who has just posted beautiful pictures of their vacation.

But the research also found the link to depression when people made comparisons with others doing worse than themselves.

Ms Steers said:

“This research and previous research indicates the act of socially comparing oneself to others is related to long-term destructive emotions.

Any benefit gained from making social comparisons is temporary and engaging in frequent social comparison of any kind may be linked to lower well-being.”

People experiencing ’emotional difficulties’ may be particularly susceptible to these comparisons, Ms Steers thinks.

During periods of emotional turmoil, other people’s lives can make them feel particularly lonely and isolated.

The study was published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology (Steers et al., 2015).

Sad tablet user image from Shutterstock

Brain scans may help people get the right therapy for depression.

Neuroscientists have shown that brain scans can predict which patients with clinical depression will benefit from talk therapy.

The technique could help avoid months of trial and error in the treatment of clinical depression.

Dr Gabriel S. Dichter, one of the study’s authors, said:

“In the future, we will be able to use non-invasive brain imaging technology to match patients with the treatment option that has the best chance of lifting their depression.

In my mind, that’s as important as developing new treatments.

We already have a lot of excellent treatments but no way to know which one is best for a particular patient.”

Around one in six people will experience a period of major depression in their lives and among these, many will have multiple bouts.

A variety of different treatments are available, but 40% of the time people are not helped by the first one they try.

In the study, published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, 23 patients experiencing a major depressive episode had their brains scanned in its resting state (Crowther et al., 2015).

They were then given a form of talk therapy known as behavioural activation.

In comparison to other therapies which delve into childhood experiences (e.g. psychodynamic) or try to alter thought processes (e.g. cognitive-behavioural therapy), behavioural activation focuses on things you can do right now.

These might include planning how to get to work on time or working out how to socialise effectively with loved ones.

Patients set clear, immediate goals, which they can then feel good about achieving.

Not all patients respond well to this type of therapy — people have different preferences — but the researchers were able to identify the brain networks linked to those who did prefer this type of therapy.

The researchers found a better response to the therapy among patients who had stronger connections in areas of the brain relating to assigning positive or negative values to events and in concentration.

Dr Dichter explained:

“There’s a complex interplay between the regions of the brain that are involved in cognitive control and those regions involved in understanding how something is going to feel.

We’ve known for a long time that atypical connections between those regions are involved in depression, but now we know that they can also be involved in how a person responds to talk therapy.”

Dr Dichter concluded:

“It’s a long road to find the right treatment for each patient.

Our goal is to develop a road map, to use this type of information to predict which patients will respond to which treatments.”

Therapy image from Shutterstock

Could there be an underlying biological cause for many mental illnesses?

Diagnoses as different as depression, addictions and schizophrenia are all linked to a similar pattern of gray-matter loss in the brain, a new study finds.

The results hint at an underlying biological cause for these mental illnesses.

Dr Thomas Insel, commenting on the study, said:

“The idea that these disorders share some common brain architecture and that some functions could be abnormal across so many of them is intriguing.”

The research, published in JAMA Psychiatry, pooled data from 193 separate studies, which included brain imaging from 7,381 patients (Goodkind et al., 2015).

Patients were experiencing all sorts of different mental illnesses, including depression, schizophrenia, OCD and some anxiety disorders.

Despite this, the researchers identified three structures in the brain which had shrunk across all the different diagnoses.

The areas of the brain — the left and right anterior insula and the dorsal anterior cingulate — are important parts of a network that is involved in making decisions, paying attention, task-switching and planning.

These connected regions of the brain are like an ‘alarm bell’, the researchers say.

Dr Amit Etkin, one of the study’s authors, explained:

“They work together, signaling to other brain regions when reality deviates from expectations — that something important and unpredicted has happened, or something important has failed to happen.”

While there were similarities between the mental illnesses, there were also differences.

People with major depression, for example, also had gray-matter loss in the hippocampus and the amygdala, areas which play key roles in memory and the emotions respectively.

Commenting, though, on the similarities seen across the different mental illnesses, Dr Insel said:

“I wouldn’t have expected these results.

I’ve been working under the assumption that we can use neuroimaging to help classify the different forms of mental illness.

This makes it harder.”

CT scans image from Shutterstock