Depression Is An Illness, Not A Weakness By Dr. Tracey Marks

  depression is an illness it's not a weakness or some fault of your own that's what I'm gonna be talking about today. Hi I'm dr. Tracey Marks, a psychiatrist and I talk about mental health and self-improvement. It pains me to see people come to my office and start to tell me about their depressions and symptoms and say that they just feel so weak. They feel like they've failed worse yet they have other people telling them you just need to get it together.

In fact you might be thinking that yourself why can't I pull it together I don't have a reason to be depressed. Well right you don't have to have a reason to feel depressed anymore then you don't have to have a reason to have diabetes or high blood pressure. I use those two illnesses because  they're similar in the sense that they both have a biological process that goes on. 

But there's still external factors that can affect them so. For example if you're borderline diabetic or borderline high blood pressure you may be told to lose weight or cut back on your salt and then may be you don't need medication. That might work for a while it might work indefinitely but eventually at some point you still may develop the disorder and no one's gonna fault you or most people probably are not going to say you just need it to pull it together or else you wouldn't have gotten that high blood pressure.  

Some people it doesn't even matter genetically they're predisposed to it similarly with depression there's a genetic component that makes people more at risk of developing depression. If they have a relative with it and similarly there's environmental factors that may influence them getting depressed or even trigger an episode. But even in theabsence of any kind of trigger you can still develop depressionat the height of your career at the top of your life.

Everything's going perfectly and you drop into a depression why does this happen?The term that probably has become cliche at this point as chemical imbalance. Well unfortunately even though that's over used it's true the main three brain chemicals that affect your mood are Norepinephrine, serotonin and dopamine those are the three brain chemicals that have been associated with mood. That is why medications target these chemicals so what happens is you have drops in your levels of serotonin norepinephrine and/or dopamine.

when this happens you have changes in your brain remember your brain is an organ just like your liver and your kidneys so if your kidneys malfunction you're gonna have trouble with your blood pressure well your brain controls pretty much everything  it's your central processing unit so if the part of my brain that controls say the left side of my body my motor movement my ability to lift my arm like this.

Then if I say have a stroke and that's not functioning properly that part of my brain then I'm either I'm gonna have weakness or I might even be paralyzed on this on this left side. But what if the part of the brain that is not functioning correctly is the part that controls your emotions because your emotions are controlled by your brain as is everything in your body. Well if that's not functioning properly then you're gonna have poor emotional regulation make sense. But I think when it comes to emotions we just it's hard to wrap your mind around and no pun intended the fact that your brain controls everything. And that so things that are emotional or also come from an organ that has to function correctly. 

We're human beings and our bodies don't always function correctly. I think where it gets harder to buy in if you will to the idea that depression is a medical illness is in how we can have days. Where let's just say you're in a funk or you feel sad and or something bad happens you lose your job or you fail a test and you feel bad for a day or two and people will say I'm depressed. It's hard to separate that or see the difference between that and the actual illness of depression.