You know there's so much talk on many physical symptoms being "psychogenic" or whatever. Even psychologists or general medical professionals will claim that whatever symptoms you are feeling are probably psychogenic.
It makes me wonder if many things might be the other way around. That there's clear physical reasons for many mental or psychological problems.
It's just always easier to claim something is psychogenic when you don't know the cause with hopes that it's enough to placebo the patient to calm down about anything they might be feeling.
When someone, especially a professional claims that whatever you are feeling is psychogenic it feels like a dismissal of what you are feeling. A person is feeling something wrong and essentially they are being told that you are imagining it, and it actually does not matter. Which in a way makes it worse, because not only you are feeling it, you are also being told you are crazy to feel it.
And that there's no hope or solution for it, because you are imagining it, therefore it can't be solved, or you don't know how to solve it in the first place.
I have a history of mental problems and I mostly attribute it to physical problems. At some point I realized that chronic pain prevented me from sleeping well and when I don't sleep well, I feel like crap. When this goes on for a long time, I don't even notice the link anymore since being in pain and sleeping bad just becomes the normal state of things.
I've been able to manage my pains by a combination of lots of aerobic exercising and yoga/stretching type workouts. I'm not in perfect condition yet, but things are certainly better.
I wonder if all or most of depression/anxiety on people is just some physical problem/pain preventing them from sleeping well and bad sleep causing them to feel like shit.
I went through something similar. A physical problem was disturbing my sleep, but not in a "I haven't slept all night" way. After a few weeks I was so fatigued and brain-fogged that I was very worried for my mental health and ability to do my job. It took a lot of time to piece together what was happening and start taking measures to get my sleep back in decent shape. This was the right call: I still have the underlying physical issue but now I can both 1) be a functional human 2) address the physical issue with a functioning brain, which would have been impossible when I was impaired by lack of sleep.
I wouldn't go as far as to say "most" depression/anxiety is caused by lack of sleep, but by now I am certain that a huge amount of undiagnosed or untreated health issues are caused by stuff like inflammation states, lack of sleep, digestion not doing its thing, muscles doing something wrong, and often more than one of these.
That it's psychogenic doesn't mean they're imagining it, or even that it's not physical. The brain is a physical organ that is responsible for regulating bodily processes after all. Mental processes have direct and obvious physical effects on other organs, so of course they can also have subtler dysregulatory effects as well.
Sometimes the cause or treatment might be physical, sometimes it might be mental, because the mental intervention might be just as effective, even with our current poor understanding of the brain.
It doesn’t mean that they are imagining it. Why is it hard to see that the organ that controls the whole body has a say into pain/inflammation, and all that? It can send my heart rate to the sky before a presentation, make my stomach ready for digestion on the sight of a billboard, etc.
I don’t know, the reverse that mental diseases don’t cause physical symptoms seems harder to believe.
It all just shows that we don’t take mental health seriously enough.
You are mistaking Stress perhaps with depression. It is 99% more likely that a physical problem is the root problem and that is causing the depression. Thats what depression is. Something is wrong with your body and your brain is sad about it. You dont just get depressed for no reason and then your body breaks for no reason from that depression.
My experience with covid is that severe post-disease inflammation can cause wild neurological symptoms including anxiety and depression. I had a 'mild' case and still suffered significant, long-lasting inflammation. I see very few people talking about this outside special-interest covid discussion boards. Surprisingly, my doctor was already aware of the destructive potential of inflammation for mental health.
Sometime early during the pandemic I believe I got Covid as my breathing got really messed up in a way my medications couldn't help and I never have asthma issues during that time of the year (no typical symptoms though). I noticed not long after that occurrence that any caffeine consumption would give me massive anxiety attacks and a heart beat out of rhythm. I've never had issues with either before. Heart stress test found nothing. I stopped caffeine for over a year. Funny thing was I found out that this wasn't a super rare occurrence either. I met other people randomly (I didn't bring it up) that quit caffeine after Covid due to a sudden intolerance for it.
I've had the same thing with caffeine causing significant anxiety that didn't occur beforehand. One of my medications also stopped working for a month afterwards. I'm surprised there's not more concern in broader society about the multi-systemic health issues this infection can cause before barreling into shoving people into crowded public spaces again, where they can catch it repeatedly.
it appears that other infections can cause similar if not identical problem, it's just that with COVID a tenth of the planet or so caught it in the span of a few months and it's (slightly) clearer what the effects are.
I feel we are shoving people into crowded public spaces because we currently have no practical alternative
I had PVCs, but only at rest. Completely disappeared with the slightest walk on the treadmill test.
Either Omnicron or a minor cold kicked all this off, plus 2 months of painful heart inflammation that couldn’t be positively diagnosed. During the inflammation, caffeine caused delayed discomfort.
The PVCs caused a lot of discomfort while resting/sleeping and were somehow worse long after exercise.
Depression disorders as treatable, “non-commitable” (i.e. won’t be thrown into the loony bin for it) condition are a fairly recent concept. I would not be surprised if it’s determined that “depression” has various etiologies.
That is, you wouldn’t tell someone that suffered complex trauma over a long period of time that they have “chronic inflammation” and tell them to take Vitamin D. However, an explanation of chronic inflammation may be more applicable to someone that doesn’t have that history.
To add to this, silos of medical specialties and their associated distinct ways of thinking will impede novel treatments. Any well-paid specialized professional will have a hard time breaking out of their ways of thinking.
Depressive disorders are understood to involve alterations in inflammation pathways. SSRIs and SNRIs have been documented to induce alterations in multiple inflammatory pathways, coinciding with improvement of depression symptoms.
That doesn’t imply that depression is a simple result of inflammatory processes, it just shows that depression is a cross-cutting alteration to the body’s function on many levels.
In some cases, depression does result from physical processes in the body going wrong. However, I think too many people try to pin mental health conditions on underlying physical problems that don’t exist. It’s very common for people to want to explain away their depression rather than accept that mental health treatment is the way forward.
Is it possible that these physical markers are a result of how a person tends to live when depressed?
When I’m in a depressive state I’m generally eating garbage food, drinking a lot, and not sleeping much (staying up late, but still needing to get up for work). All of this is going to lead to a lot of inflammation and other negative physiological outcomes.
I’m dealing with this right now. I have mild chest pain, and have for weeks. This has happened before, cleaning up my diet, even just for a few days, made it go away.
It’s somewhat a chicken and egg problem to fix though. Mentally, things suck, so I want to keep doing what I’m doing, which causes physical discomfort. Overriding the desire to eat and drink the bad stuff, through sheer force of will, will ultimately alleviate the physical issues, and at the same time clear my my head to some degree… at least until something else pushes me over the edge. When I get pushed back into it, it’s normally just looking for a mental escape from discomfort. If I simply went to sleep instead, I’d probably be all good. I say simply, but that’s always been the hard part for me.
If someone’s coping mechanism is unhealthy lifestyle, then it can surely have an effect, but it is absolutely not surprising that certain mental health issues can in and of itself cause physical symptoms.
Like, you wouldn’t be surprised that a panic attack causes an actual hormonal response, that will actually cause the heart rate to jump, etc. Why are we surprised that depression causes other symptoms?
Also, it is well documented that when the husband/wife in an elderly couple passes, the other often follows them. Also, will of living greatly corresponds to survival in hospitalized elderly.
Too much sleep can also have detrimental effects to your health; I used to think that more sleep was always good. I gained the ability to sleep as much as I wanted, whenever I wanted and it was great … for a while.
> too many people try to pin mental health conditions on underlying physical problems that don’t exist
it wouldn't be the first disorder where after years of "it's psychological, there is no underlaying physical issue" it turns out that there is an underlying physical problem, see the history of gastric ulcers
There are roughly 2 ways to define illness - a cause leading to symptoms (HIV virus -> AIDS) or symptoms without a defined cause (eg, nausea).
Depression seems to be the second type, so I'm not sure it makes sense to talk about that sort of discovery. It seems self evident to me that sometimes depression will be caused by inflammation. Other times it'll be caused by other things. Brains are delicate self modifying machines, they can go haywire from pretty much anything and nothing. We can only find that some factors were underweighted or overweighted by the medical community under some circumstances. Depending on what definition of "depression" gets used.
I could see this being true when depression arises spontaneously. Do you think this could be the case as well for depression that's triggered by life events?
You could probably argue that if you have these issues you may still be coping ok, but when life events hit on top they bring it to a point where it crosses into debilitating.
I mean, inflammation markers are very common in mood disorders. The direction of causality is interesting to me. I tend to believe that there is a disease process somewhere we have not yet found that causes this inflammation, rather than feeling sad (or manic) causes inflammation
It makes me wonder if many things might be the other way around. That there's clear physical reasons for many mental or psychological problems.
It's just always easier to claim something is psychogenic when you don't know the cause with hopes that it's enough to placebo the patient to calm down about anything they might be feeling.
When someone, especially a professional claims that whatever you are feeling is psychogenic it feels like a dismissal of what you are feeling. A person is feeling something wrong and essentially they are being told that you are imagining it, and it actually does not matter. Which in a way makes it worse, because not only you are feeling it, you are also being told you are crazy to feel it.
And that there's no hope or solution for it, because you are imagining it, therefore it can't be solved, or you don't know how to solve it in the first place.