Interplay between psychological and physiological factors in depression

I seem to have committed the same stupid mistake again. Without consulting my doctor, I have discontinued my medication. And predictably, the results are typical-within 4 days of doing so, I have sunk into depression and thinking of returning to the railway track again -for the one last time. As i write this blog, I have woken up from a nightmarish sleep , full of visions of the impending doom . I haven't taken bath for days, and seems I haven't brushed my teeth either.

Of course, I still have the prescription card with me, so tomorrow morning I can go to the market and buy my medicines, and I should be fine within a week or so. If the need arises, I can even go to a doctor.

But that is the not the topic of my present blog. All that I have said in my previous posts, seems to have been nullified by whats happening now. For in the previous posts, I have concentrated only on the psychological background of mental disorders. But as my present state is enough evidence , mental disorders are rarely due to purely psychological factors. Surely my thinking could not have changed so drastically within a short span of 4 days, so as to bring about the present situation. The truth being , it has been long suspected that mental illnesses happen due to an interplay of both psychological and physiological factors. That is, besides the psychological factors like learned helplessness I have mentioned in my previous posts, biochemical factors like neurotransmitter imbalance is also responsible. The medicine I am taking , Escitalopram, is supposed to function, by restoring the depleted levels of serotonin in the synaptic cleft. Again, there is further evidence to show that the effect of antidepressants is actually not due to the serotonin-restoring function of the medicine, but that the serotonin restoring function also restores the neurogenesis in the hippocampus, and it is this resumed neurogenesis that is actually responsible for the therapeutic effect. But of course , I would not go deep into the biology of the situation, since it is likely to make my situation worse ( I was a student of biology before I decided to take up psychology, I had dropped out of biology due to my illness; reminding myself of anything connected with that will only lead to further post mortem analysis. ) . But it is hard not to notice that this recent situation arising out of depleted serotonin levels or reduced neurogenesis, or whatever biological factors , has impacted my psychology , drastically . Within 4 days, I have switched from learned optimism to learned helplessness, believing that because I have failed once in my lifetime, I will fail again and again since anyways the factors that lead to failure were beyond my control and even beyond my wildest expectation, and this will remain the situation until I am able to muster courage for visiting the railway track for the one last time.

But what is learned optimism and how it is the opposite of my current pathological state of mind. I would discuss , this issue in a subsequent post, as I had promised earlier.