What is the science behind depression?

>>8816729
You feel sad

>>8816729
The brain is an extremely complex device. It is easy to have an imbalance of neurotransmitters. This causes chemcial depression.

>>8816729
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc#t=213

>>8816729
Brain shrinkage.

>>8816729
Just done be sad lol

brain is complex. a lot of things can go wrong

>>8817071
that was a good video, thanks

>>8817071
Thank you! This is what I was looking for

>>8816729
Best piece of advice I can give you: Your brain is an organ, and just like your liver or pancreas, you can't control it. Attempting to control your brain or change it will make you more depressed. That doesn't mean you shouldn't seek treatment whether it is CBT or pharmaceutical. Just remember, my brain is an organ that is going to do what it wants, and I'm along for the ride. That's not going to fix it, but it will reduce stress and anxiety about changing the impossible.

>>8816729
You are so persistently confronted with (on an evolutionary scale) atypical stimuli, that your brain chemistry goes to shit. Typical stimuli are usually something like

>You are confronted with a problem (hunger, immediate danger etc)
>You become stressed as you try to solve it
>You eventually solve the problem
>You are alright again

These days stimuli are more of the type

>You are stressed, constantly confronted with vague, abstract fears and desires
>You never solve any of the problems as you don't even completely understand where they come from or what they really are, or you can't solve them because life is so fucking complicated these days

Most of those problems we would usually solve by hitting other people in their faces or run away, but we are socially bound to keep on with all this dissatisfying shit. At some point your brain is done with trying to make sense out of that situation and just kind of gives up.

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>>8816729
Biological Comprehension:
1.) Deficiency in both dopamine (for all intensive purposes, a mood 'balancing' neurotransmitter) and serotonin (the general understanding is that this regulates positive moods).
2.) Heredity is being researched to impact chemical levels in the brain but there's nothing conclusive with genetics in this area yet.
Sociocultural Comprehension:
1.) First world countries tend to yield higher rates of depression as well as suicide. There are some criticisms of this based on the record keeping of third world countries lacking but the theoretical premises sort of make sense. Basically, if you have 'more' then you don't appreciate life as much.
2.) Depression can be seen many hundreds of years back in history but just recently (post world-war II), depression has been getting more attention. Specifically, generation X and the millennial generations have become the sort of poster children for depression. There's not a whole lot of research to explain correlations but it's been my understanding that the strong shift towards productivity and individualism that's been challenged after the cultural revolution in the 60's makes a pretty good case for this.
Psychological Comprehension:
1.) When one feels a sense of inadequacy for oneself, they begin to feel a deep sadness. In cases that I've looked into, depression has been linked to a lack of productivity feeding a cycle of feeling inadequate. I'm interested in conducted some research studies on the topic but need to get a bit more background on it.

Productivity could explain why things like exercise, a new job, and new friends reduce the crippling emotional effects that come with depression.

~Psychfag, depressionfag,
Hope I gave you some insight.

>>8817570
You certainly did. Thank you

>>8816729
If you are depressed you need to get off grains and dairy immediately.

A good book is Grain Brain. Eliminate all processed foods and start eating a lot of vegetables and saturated fat.

>>8817688
im lactose intolerant and don't have a high-grain diet and i had depression

>>8817361
I suffered from depression in the past and I had a hyphothesis like this, but I never did search about it (it's not my area). But do you have any book or article about it? Reading someone else saying it now makes me interested again.

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>>8819368
unabomber's manifesto, not joking, he basically rambles on about this for a few hundred paragraphs

if you ignore the illogical and insane things he has in the paper, most of what remains is related to that subject and makes sense

though the basic idea in my opinion is that our evolutionary, organic, genetic tools were sort of compatible in an ad-hoc (by the definition of evolution) to the environment we had about 200k years ago

but now our biology hasn't evolved as fast as humanity as a whole did, so we end up having a set of tools that's kind of incompatible with the current world, laughter, hunger, thirst, goal-driven behavior, sex that devolved into strange, reproductively useless fetishes like foot fetish and etc

this incompatibility of course generates stress, intellectual, physical and ultimately genetical incompatibility = maladaptation

>>8819403
ad hoc way*
>>8819368
I mean, imagine putting a suit on a gorilla or on a dog and putting him on a podium, surrounded by people, Chances are that the gorilla is going to do random, apparently inane shit like throwing garbage at the public or literally throwing its shit at people and trying to run away to a safe place. But it's not inane or illogical, that's what it's biologically made to do in response to such a strange, artificial situation. Depression is a normal response to confusing, difficult, stressful, strange, complex situations that assault you with information. Sensory assault.

Now, that's an exaggerated example, as humans are more adapted to modern society than a gorilla is, but I wanted to show that when you advance / evolve too much (in a different direction) from tribal society (to which gorillas are adapted, too, that's why i gave that example) you start to have a problem that's similar to a society of cavemen in business suits. Incompatible biology. Biology did not adapt fast enough to keep up with modern technology, science, laws, etc. The common man, at least.

A few thousand years ago we were fucking our own relatives, killing people with spears, shitting in the woods, etc. Now we have computers, social media, we can speak with billions of people, we can relate to them, we can learn multiple languages. We have physics, math, advanced math, not simple arithmetic. Complex information that was very difficultly built on top of our basic building blocks that we have wired into our brains, such as addition and the ability to visualize data.

It's too much, for most people. We're still biologically very similar, almost the same to the guys that were wearing loincloths and shitting in the woods.

>>8819403
>>8819439
Thank you, I will read it.
But as I said, I agree with the idea. However I would like to know if there was some sort of more precise empirical research or something to support it.

That said, I don't know how empirical research can be done to said problem - it's not my area, as I said.

>>8819471
No idea. But in either case I'm treating this problem like this: stop depression as soon as possible by making efforts to adapt (for ex, by having a nice career and financial stability). If you don't adapt fast, you get depressed. While you're depressed, you are worse at adapting, at living. Feedback loop.

>>8817063
You will never understand depression if you're stuck at the most bottom up description of the psyche