Depression, Transmissable Conditions and Why Cats Make You Mad
Sunday, October 9th, 2005 12:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamaranthAges ago, I posted about whether emotional / mental conditions might be transmissable, rather than rooted in the wiring.
I've just been reading a piece in National Geographic. Snappily titled Cat Carrier: Your Cat Could Make You Crazy*, it does actually discuss the role of infection in mental illness. The article focusses on long-term effects of toxoplasma, but there are links to some other discussions.
This one (page down to 'Microbes and Mental Illness') is quite interesting:
Psychiatric syndromes caused by infectious disease most commonly include depression, OCD, panic disorder, social phobias, variants of ADD, episodic impulsive hostility, bipolar disorders, eating disorders, dementia, various cognitive impairments, psychosis, and a few cases of dissociative episodes.
I'm taking it with a hefty pinch of salt, since it seems to encompass so very much: also, given that the page is published by the Lyme Alliance, there's an emphasis on tick-borne infections. (Should I be having vivid flashbacks to the tick-bites I suffered one summer in France, aged 10? Probably not.)
Seems to me there are four potential components:
- physical issues with nerves, brain, etc ("I am depressed because my brain doesn't work properly.")
- genetic issues ("I am depressed because my ancestors bred with the wrong people.")
- infection-related issues ("I am depressed because I caught depression.")
- environmental issues ("I am depressed because of things that have happened to me.")
When I was a lot younger I thought of depression as a kind of choice, something that could be staved off by positive thinking, therapy etc. I find it more logical, now, to think of it as an illness -- caused by some combination of those four components -- that, yes, can be treated, can be fought, but is not something to blame oneself for suffering.
I also firmly believe that depression can be a result of physical illness: that pain and infirmity (and all that results from these) can induce persistent negative states of mind. That comes under 'environmental'. I'm still thinking about the distinction between this and infectious depression.
Do any of you (especially the medical types) have any observations?
*I think this is probably a different thing to 'your cat could drive you mad', which counts as Stating the Bleedin' Obvious
I've just been reading a piece in National Geographic. Snappily titled Cat Carrier: Your Cat Could Make You Crazy*, it does actually discuss the role of infection in mental illness. The article focusses on long-term effects of toxoplasma, but there are links to some other discussions.
This one (page down to 'Microbes and Mental Illness') is quite interesting:
Psychiatric syndromes caused by infectious disease most commonly include depression, OCD, panic disorder, social phobias, variants of ADD, episodic impulsive hostility, bipolar disorders, eating disorders, dementia, various cognitive impairments, psychosis, and a few cases of dissociative episodes.
I'm taking it with a hefty pinch of salt, since it seems to encompass so very much: also, given that the page is published by the Lyme Alliance, there's an emphasis on tick-borne infections. (Should I be having vivid flashbacks to the tick-bites I suffered one summer in France, aged 10? Probably not.)
Seems to me there are four potential components:
- physical issues with nerves, brain, etc ("I am depressed because my brain doesn't work properly.")
- genetic issues ("I am depressed because my ancestors bred with the wrong people.")
- infection-related issues ("I am depressed because I caught depression.")
- environmental issues ("I am depressed because of things that have happened to me.")
When I was a lot younger I thought of depression as a kind of choice, something that could be staved off by positive thinking, therapy etc. I find it more logical, now, to think of it as an illness -- caused by some combination of those four components -- that, yes, can be treated, can be fought, but is not something to blame oneself for suffering.
I also firmly believe that depression can be a result of physical illness: that pain and infirmity (and all that results from these) can induce persistent negative states of mind. That comes under 'environmental'. I'm still thinking about the distinction between this and infectious depression.
Do any of you (especially the medical types) have any observations?
*I think this is probably a different thing to 'your cat could drive you mad', which counts as Stating the Bleedin' Obvious
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Date: Sunday, October 9th, 2005 10:31 pm (UTC)Actually, 'bucket' isn't the best analogy. A better one would be a sort of tall, narrow conical hill with a well sunk into it. The closer the water is to the top, the thinner and more permeable the wall of the well is. How permeable varies from person to person; some people are fine until the well is almost full, whilst others risk leakage once there's any amount of water.
(Ooops. That nasty twanging noise is my analogy stretching well beyond its elastic limit.)