The Mystery Known as Depression, Part 9/12

9. DEPRESSION IS REPRESSION ELEVATED TO A HIGHER LEVEL

“Repression” of pain on various levels can begin in the womb at any point during the nine months of gestation, when the neuroinhibitors in the fetal brain work to quell pain. It is mostly established in the last trimester of pregnancy. At that point, the fetus can feel pain and can repress. The deepest most severe repression occurs during fetal life and at birth because it is nearly always a matter of life and death (Anand & Scalzo, 2000). These dangerous situations call for extreme responses from the fetus. Repression during this time then becomes global, or system-wide, and affects every aspect of the fetus’ body and development. It’s easy to sense that kind of early global inhibition in someone because they have a flattened emotionality, having not developed an emotional life before repression set in; and the cause of it happened before they even took their first breath in the world. Incidentally, it can also determine how he functions sexually. He doesn’t have the biochemical equipment to be tenacious, aggressive, assertive, optimistic, or future oriented, or sexually erect. This is because the prototype has a global affect on his entire physiological system and the impotence he felt at birth is an impotence that may assert itself in later years sexually. His whole system veers toward less testosterone, dopamine, glutamate, and noradrenaline, lower serotonin and higher cortisol. This is the material of impotence; it is not just an attitude that we can change in order to be more assertive. We are impotent on the deepest levels of brain function.

Evidence is mounting that those with depression are more likely to develop heart disease. (Freedland & Carney, 2013) Considering that deep depression means deep repression and that means deep pain, the conclusion is not surprising. There are two schools of thought as to why. The first is that the biochemical changes – the release of stress hormones – and autonomic changes occurring during depression affect the heart. The second view is that depression makes people sad and they then neglect their health. I’d opt for the first, only let's go further and say that the very early imprint that makes people depressed also ultimately affects their heart; stress hormones play a role in both conditions. Those who are depressed/repressed may have sporadically higher blood pressure in some cases and if one neglects one's medication a heart attack can ensue. This article notes that one in six adults suffer from depression from time to time. Those who have suffered heart attacks and who were also depressed were four times more likely to die of a heart attack in the following six months. Researchers have found that some depressed patients are in a state of hyper-arousal, and that means more pressure and activation of the heart. Stress hormones speed up the heart. What causes chronic high levels of stress hormones? Largely, it is due to the imprints of trauma.

In this context, researchers have implicated that hormones play a significant role in depression. A 1998 report in Scientific American, titled “The Neurobiology of Depression.” (Nemeroff, 1998) notes that the monoamine norepinephrine (noradrenaline) is low in depression, some thirty percent less than in a normal population. It leads some professionals to think of depression as a “brain disease.” Norepinephrine (a monoamine), by and large, is a stimulating neuronal activator. It is manufactured mainly in circuits that emanate from the locus ceruleus, a brainstem structure. There are projections elsewhere in the brain, particularly, to the limbic system. Because there is not enough of this in depression it may lead to the false conclusion that this deficiency causes depression.