Early Abuse Affects Depression, Mental Health

It is no secret that children who have experienced abuse or neglect are at a high risk of developing a wide range of mental problems in life, and the range seems to cover the whole list of disorders and illnesses. Other problems include an increased likelihood of substance abuse and suicidal tendencies. While this is no longer surprising, even if it can be considered rather tragic, it has managed to raise a significant question.

It isn't unknown for depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions to be influenced by biological factors. Levels of hormones in the brain, glands producing too much or too little of certain chemicals, and other factors can all cause someone to develop one of many psychological problems. The answer to the question of whether or not abuse can cause biological changes leading to mental health problems has never really been answered, let alone answered in a satisfactory manner. However, that doesn't mean researchers aren't trying.

Researchers have determined that affectionate parenting helps alter certain expressions in the genes of animals, and this allows them to dampen their psychological response to stress impulses. These buffers were also found to be passed on from generation to generation, particularly among primates. It was also found that species that were better suited to handle stress on a biological level were also more likely to care for their offspring.

There has never been any direct evidence linking this sort of mechanism to humans until recently. A study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience indicated that people who were abused or neglected during their childhood years showed a number of alterations to their genes that made them more sensitive to stress than the average person. The data helped clarify an old question of whether or not a difficult childhood could affect one's mental resiliency.

Summary : For many years, it was unknown whether or not childhood abuse could have a biological effect leading to depression and other mental problems. Recent research has revealed that abuse during childhood does cause biological changes that could lead to various disorders.

The Role Emotions Play In Man's Overall Wellness

It has always been said that a healthy body cannot be divorced from a healthy mind or a healthy spirit. Emotional health is considered an integral part of man's overall wellness. Neglecting your emotional health can damage your physical health in the process. Research has shown that one of the leading contributors to illness is stress caused by unresolved emotional issues.

Psychologists believe that emotions, such as fear, joy, sadness, or anger, are mental responses to events, circumstances, people, or our own thoughts and memories. They course through our conscious and unconscious beings at all times, whether at critical junctures or during seemingly inconsequential moments of our lives.

Biologists, on the other hand, tells us that our emotions are rooted in self-preservation, triggering physiological reactions that enable us to find food, escape danger, and reproduce. Author Daniel Goleman pointed out in his work, Emotional Intelligence (Bantam, 1995), “All emotions are, in essence, impulses to act, the instant plans for handling life that evolution has instilled in us.”

Emotions have also evolved into facial expressions and body language so that each member of the group can signal his or her wants and needs to other members. As John D. Mayer, a leading expert in the study of emotions, has remarked: “Emotions convey information...about relationships.”

Emotions are so powerful it has the ability to make us sick, as well as provide healing. Emotions are relayed to the immune system through the autonomic nervous system. When people experience anxiety, depression, and other painful emotions, the immune system can be affected and may cause risk for a whole host of illnesses. In the same way, having a healthy emotional outlook in life can boost the resistance against disease.

Mayer has emphasized, “People can reason with emotions in the same way they reason with cognitive information. So you can solve emotional problems just as mathematicians solve math problems.” However, he also acknowledged that some emotions, such as grief and anger, can be harder to reason effectively with than others. And oftentimes, identifying the various emotions at play can be extremely difficult.

Re-writing The Book On Psychiatry

The revised edition is a good three years away from publication – if not more so. Yet, even as early as that, there are already debates raging about the content of the book. Psychiatrists the world over have engaged in arguments on what should and should not end up as recognized conditions in the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The outcome of the debates and questions could determine changes to existing policies regarding insurance reimbursement, research, and even how to classify people's psychological profiles and histories. So it comes down to more than just which apparent mental illness gets to join conditions like depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia in the text.

Should compulsive shopping be considered a mental problem? Is the so-called “post-nuptial depression” a real mental disorder, or just part of the transition from single life to married life? Should this fetish or that be considered a mental disorder, as many of them currently are? These questions need to be answered before the revised edition of the manual – arguably the main authority psychiatrists consult on mental illnesses – is put to the printers. It has become so contentious in some areas that contributors are being made to agree to a nondisclosure agreement for the first time since the book's inception.

The debates rage because the book is not merely a manual, but also serves as a medical guidebook and, according to some, a bit of a cultural institution. The text is designed to help doctors make an accurate diagnosis, provides insurance companies with codes that would help them reimburse for a patient's treatment claims, and serves as reference material for many mental health professionals. The manual typically organizes conditions under evocative names, with labels such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and clinical depression having strong connotations outside of the mental health profession.

One concern of the people behind the manual is that their field is not like other medical fields, where the conditions are relatively well-known. For the most part, prior to the introduction of Prozac, psychiatrists were uncertain about what, exactly, caused most mental disorders. The manual doesn't address all those concerns, but it does provide a good framework for the ones that medical science does have an understanding of.