CH 16

Studies in the field have sustained evidence that depression is not a way to become a myth or a legend. Animals get depressed too. Yet, people get depressed just because they have a brain. The crescent number of individuals who commit suicide every year or become emotionally handicapped because of the effects of depression has shown that depression is indeed a complex mental disorder that affects people of both sexes from everywhere.     

Still, it is a debilitating disease characterized by a serious difficulty to process particularly negative emotions and feelings during people's lives. Stressful experiences turn out to be unbearable and a source of profound despair and desolation, but sometimes these feelings can also occur without any apparent reason. The pathology has a great heritage component that leads susceptible people to develop the disorder at any point in their lives, triggered by impacting events that some individuals can not cope with properly. 

Important researchers using neuroimaging suggested that the differentiated way these individuals process their emotional charges might be related to dysfunction in the prefrontal cortex areas. Some regions are more active than others, especially the Subgenual ACC, an important brain area connected to the amygdala, responsible for regulating our negative emotional responses.  On the other hand, consistent studies have investigated one of the important characteristics of the disorder, the disturbances during sleep time, to convey more substantial knowledge about the symptoms of depression and developing new treatments.  Through these studies, researchers suggested the relationship of depression of the circadian rhythms and depression based on the fact that the REM phase's suppression can bring therapeutic effects to the patient.  

Such studies have positively impacted increasing the scope of depression, motivating the search for different treatments than the classical methods that are still widely applied to treating the disease's effects through monoamine agonist drugs. Although biological treatments have successfully evolved over the years, for some treatment-resistant depression patients, the disease is still an everyday burden. 

Carlson, Neil R.; Birkett, Melissa A.. Physiology of Behavior (2-downloads). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.