Recently, researchers at UK’s University of Warwick performed an experiment on a group of depressed people to learn more about this common, yet serious, mental condition. They used a group of 39 depressed people and 37 control subjects without depression in order to distinguish the differences in their mental patterns. The differences they noticed in the depressed participants’ brain circuitry were the uncoupling of the connections between different areas of the brain; when circuits are uncoupled, two sections of the brain cannot work together to perform complex thinking processes. One circuit that was frequently uncoupled in depressed participants’ brains was the “hate circuit”, a circuit associated with feelings of hatred. When shown pictures of things they hated, depressed subjects showed little to no response, whilst healthy patients had a clear and defined response. This was puzzling to many researchers, but one had a theory. Researcher Jianfeng Feng said, “One possibility is that the uncoupling of this hate circuit could be associated with impaired ability to control and learn from social or other situations which provoke feelings of hate towards self or others. This in turn could lead to an inability to deal appropriately with feelings of hate and an increased likelihood of both uncontrolled self-loathing and withdrawal from social interactions.”
This article gave me some good insight into the condition of depression. I have known people who have suffered from depression, so I am always interested to learn more about this mental condition. This reasoning behind the actions of depressed people and their apathy towards lots of things, especially things they hate, makes sense to me and it is very good information to have. I am also glad to know that researchers are working hard and making progress in studying depression; it is a serious condition and the more they discover about it, the closer they are to finding more treatments for it.
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