Brain Rewires Itself To Prevent Depression

[Julieanne]

• Jake Richardson
• March 28, 2012

A preliminary study of 10- to 14-year-old girls whose mothers are, or have been depressed, has uncovered a fascinating potential for their brains. Because related research has shown girls born from depressed mothers or mothers who have experienced depression have a higher risk of the illness, they were the focus of Stanford researchers. What they found though could be of use to everyone.

Read more: http://www.care2.com/greenliving/bra...#ixzz1qahY4Neh

[Julieanne]

My mother suffered from depression, and I have too, most of my life. But no-one recognised it for many years.

[Pattypans]

Julieanne, that must make (have made?) for a doubly difficult struggle. How do you handle it now (if you don't mind my asking)? (If you do mind, please forgive me and disregard the question.)

As for the article, their strategies for lessening negative responses pretty much boil down to thinking about things that make you happy (first experiment) and not dwelling on, but rather steering away from, things that worry you or make you feel sad (second experiment.) These are, of course (minus the software/computer aspect of experiment #2) time-honored mental and emotional habits or practices. I guess the interesting, valuable part is that they've proven that these deliberate choices can actually alter or affect brain activity.

Freedom-loving, vigilant (not vigilante) person that I am, though, I have to say that the technique used in the second experiment, which involves software, seems full of potential for abuse by unethical power figures. For example, let's say that someone having authority over others wanted to lessen the "negative impact" on people who were protesting the authorities' mistreatment of others. They could make the software reflect just that sort of mistreatment, then "lead them away" by a dot on the screen from the negative reality image to a positive image, and this could (if it worked as it did in the experiment) eventually change those people's reactions to seeing someone tortured or treated badly from negative to positive. Even the title on a different Stanford page with a video about the experiments is "Beating Depression with Brain Control."

[Reesacat]

I think perhaps what helped the most in this experiment was showing the girls the graphs of their brain activity and they could see they had the power to change their brains and the tools to do it.

[Pattypans]

That sounds right, Reesacat.