The brain is an organ like any other, and therefore, can get a disease.
Being depressed, and having depression are two different things. Being depressed is a normal emotion that passes with time, and can be worked on (cheered up, if you will).
Depression, on the other hand, is a neurochemical transmitter disease. Because of a severe underproduction of serotonin, the receptors in the brain can not produce enough dopamine. Dopamine allows for emotional control, emotional stability, contributes to what ‘happy’ feels like.
That means a person with depression is simply not capable of getting past traumatic experiences, or in many cases of depression, unable to deal with the minor stresses of life even. The brain effectively shuts down. The body wants nothing more than to sleep, and basic day to day tasks become difficult. Things that once could have been shaken of as mere annoyances now become traumas. Our brain simply does not allow us to respond any other way because it doesn’t work correctly. It is not a personality issue. Sometimes the brain never works right in the first place, in many cases the emotional control centers of the brain stop functioning normally after either a single, deeply traumatic experience, or years of bullying/abuse/etc.
This can go on for days, weeks, months, sometimes even years before the brain picks back up on serotonin production. But this wears down over time, the brain recovering less and less each time. Eventually a person with depression will need serious help. I strongly believe that medications that aide the production of serotonin should be a central component of this care.
I know all of this so well because I live with it in my brain, and I have for most of my life.
The point of this post is that I have been seeing lots of comments here on FB in relation to Chester Bennington’s death; saying that they don’t understand how he could have been so depressed when he was a popular, world famous, multi-millionaire rock-star.
So I hope I have successfully educated some of you reading this, and hopefully you will now be able to star more effectively helping those that live with the disease of depression. Remember, telling us to ‘just get over it’, isn’t helpful at all; we’d love, but we can’t, our brains have a disease that prevent it from functioning properly.
-Mike Guy
Feathered Angels 