
Reconceptualizing major depressive disorder as an infectious disease - winstonsmith
http://www.biolmoodanxietydisord.com/content/4/1/10
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pasbesoin
What has bothered me about medical practice -- at least and especially
mainstream medical practice in the U.S. -- is that there is so much
professionally declared "It can't be. That doesn't exist. Etc." until the
evidence becomes overwhelming to the contrary.

That is, that absence of evidence is taken for and prescriptively treated as
absolute evidence of absence.

"Cancer is not contagious." Well, as I seem to recall from recent comments of
an expert in the field, we are now looking at upwards of 30% of types of
cancer being tied to an infectious agent.

Not yet having read the OP link, I already recall that researchers are now,
per popular/mainstream reporting, looking at, among other things, the human
biome (symbiotic organisms such as microflora) as likely playing a significant
role in health including mental health.

First, it was "all in your head". Then, it was "your genetics" \-- and new
classes of pills.

Now, finally, some acknowledgement that if your environment sucks, lo and
behold, this may physically, and not just "psychically", affect your well
being.

In summary, treat the patient, not the prescribed domain of a medical
profession whose institutions have more than a bit of sometimes blindered
self-interest.

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jrapdx3
Certainly a reasonable hypothesis in light of the growing body of evidence
that inflammatory factors are implicated in MDD and other psychiatric
disorders.

Furthermore, clinical observation supports the idea. It's quite common during
the course of a cold or similar infection that patients will complain of
having increased depressive symptoms.

However inflammation is a very generic phenomenon which implies a greatly
diverse range of influences operating to bring about emergence of MDD. For
example, depression frequently accompanies post-surgical recovery which evokes
inflammatory responses even in the absence of infection.

While an infectious form of MDD is plausible, it wouldn't be the only
important source of depressive conditions. In this sense, MDD is like a "final
common pathway", the idea that clinically visible syndromes comes about
through numerous paths. The key concept is that the mechanisms leading to the
final path segment can be dissimilar and even non-overlapping.

It means there's truly no distinct, singular "cause" of the condition, or
rather there are numerous disease processes that happen to present similarly.

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mabbo
When we look back at the history of many illnesses, it's easy to wonder how
the previous generations could have been so dumb to not have realized the root
causes. The story of stomach ulcers is especially wonderful, because it's so
recent [1] (stomach ulcers were obviously caused by stress, and poor diet,
etc).

One wonders how many obvious root causes to common illnesses are sitting right
in front of us. A good friend of mine has dealt with depression issues for
many years. I'd love to learn that a quick anti-parasite treatment would
relieve her of the pain she's dealt with.

[1]: [http://discovermagazine.com/2010/mar/07-dr-drank-broth-
gave-...](http://discovermagazine.com/2010/mar/07-dr-drank-broth-gave-ulcer-
solved-medical-mystery)

~~~
bayesianhorse
Well, no. If there had been obvious causes for major depression, they would
have been found by now. There may be some infectious agents who induce
depressions (like hepatitis), and some have not yet been discovered, but I
highly doubt that a major infectious cause for major depression is still
"hiding".

~~~
EdwardCoffin
Did you miss the comparison to ulcers and how long their real cause was
overlooked in favour of a mistaken cause?

------
ada1981
After healing myself from serious suicidal depression / mania without long
term psychiatric drugs, what I can say is this..

Depression should be examined as a strategy one uses to avoid feeling past a
certain threshold. Certain "emotional states" get coded in as unsafe in our
implicit memory system and instead of experiencing the emotion we push it into
our cortext where we can wrap a story around it..

Writing Gratitude letters is as effective as Prozac in many people; this was
in fact one of my primary tools. The other was a commitment to feeling all my
emotions without trying to escape them and to face the fear and anxiety
directly. This felt like dying -- in fact this is what has been called "an ego
death" or "spirtual rebirth". In Modern speak, I'd say this is the rough
equivlent of using your cortext to bootstrap an emotional experience in the
lymbic system that recodes implicit memory in the amygdala. It's damn hard to
do, and for good reason -- you don't want to give write access to your source
code to any old program.. This is why psyhedelics can work well -- they can
rewrite those implicit emotional memories.

I've been having great success with this model with my coaching clients and am
developing a more robust model and writings on this.. Of course, happy to
provide my usual free session for benevolent hackers who may be struggling
with "depression".

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kazinator
I absolutely agree with this. Once I was hit by a bug that completely brought
me down _mentally_ for several days, before the physical symptoms hit (ending
in emergency on IV). In the depressed state, I went on a job interview, and
totally bombed.

Another person who caught the same thing had the same symptoms: dysphoria, low
energy, no appetite --- and then the physical stuff: nausea, vomiting,
dehydration, ...

It is entirely plausible that some viruses cause a protracted form of the
former symptoms.

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aw3c2
The domain looks so super trashy and spammy, is this an actual trustworthy
journal?

~~~
winstonsmith
Submitter here. I ended up at that journal by following a link in this opinion
blog at _The New York Times_ : [http://op-
talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/26/what-if-were-wro...](http://op-
talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/26/what-if-were-wrong-about-depression/) The
author, Anna North, thinks it's legit. Also, it's linked to here by the NIH:
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/journals/1820/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/journals/1820/)

~~~
aw3c2
Thank you!

