Depression. Are the Chemical Changes Caused by Our Thoughts?

In 2015  the Huffington Post reported that 350,000,000 people worldwide suffered from depression.

Clinical Depression is often said to be caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain because in many cases, there is a reduction in the amount of certain neurotransmitters found (monoamines such as serotonin and norepinephrine) in depressed people. But is that the cause of the depression or the result of it?

According to WHO, “Depression results from a complex interaction of social, psychological and biological factors. People who have gone through adverse life events (unemployment, bereavement, psychological trauma) are more likely to develop depression.”

A World Health Assembly resolution passed in May 2013 has called for a comprehensive, coordinated response to mental disorders at country level.

Speaking from  a personal level, it would probably be unlikely that all but the tiniest fraction of those  350 million people with depression could possibly have been raised by someone with the degree of depression that my mother had; and  could not have suffered the kind of trauma someone so lost felt was appropriate to dish up, just so she could feel “happy”.

The same afferent nerves are used for the transmission of pleasure and pain, and so when the afferent nerves are trained to get pleasure from pain through experience, it is very difficult to get pleasure from pleasure any more.  So depression becomes chronic and more pain is necessary to inflict in order to feel anything at all, because feeling nothing is so unfair.

Like everyone else, I was born knowing the difference between right and wrong, whereas if I had have been born an animal I would only have the knowledge of right or good.  

eve serpent apple = choice
The serpent offered choice. Depression may result from the wrong choice.
But since the malic acid in the apple turned on the gene for knowledge of both good and evil, and that gene has been passed down in the turned on state since then, so I knew that everything my mother was doing and thinking was on the wrong side of the equation. So I learned before I could talk that her choice to hate her fellowman was not a wise one, regardless of what someone or anyone had done to her.

At that tender age, I still had the memory of what it was like in the plasma state I had just come from, and so I was fully aware that everything was a part of the one event, and to harm anyone or anything in creation was the same as harming oneself.  I knew that if I stepped over the line with her then I would be as miserable as she was.  But more importantly, I knew that it was against my nature – both human and animal – to behave as though I was not a part of universal Consciousness.

But she had it in for universal Consciousness, or God, big time, because she had begged God for her fiancé to be allowed to come back from World War II, but her pleas were ignored.  So she turned to Lucifer with the rest of the leading lights in town (the so-called ‘illuminati’).

They believe that  the idea is to “overcome polarity” by providing a “playground of infinite experience”, so they balance atrocious acts with equally kind ones, and in that way they believe they will become ‘perfected beings’, able to take on their nemesis, God.  And Lucifer insists on those atrocities to be up there with Aleister Crowley’s who considered himself to be the most evil man on earth.  So at all their sabbats she got to call down Behemoth to help her and the rest of them in their evil endeavors.

Of course, the flaw in that logic is that everyone who has come back from a near death experience like me understands that God really is Love, and atrocities are never a part of Love. Duality only exists here as a test, because  life is really just a spiritual journey.  It seems that if we are to be like ‘God’ by having the knowledge of good and evil and having the ability to choose between them – as the serpent in the Garden of Eden is said to have promised – then we can only be like Him if we realize that there really isn’t a choice, and duality is just an illusion, because All is One.

So I am not talking about Abraham’s God  who is a part- time psychopath if the Bible is true, but I am talking about Divine Consciousness, which is called the ‘unconscious’ by psychologists.  According to Freud , “the unconscious mind is the primary source of human behavior” (1915), so they know that it is the unconscious, or what really is Consciousness, that monitors and motivates our thoughts and actions.  And it is geared towards survival or life, and not destruction or death.

Once a person steps over the line between good and evil, life and death, they know at the ‘unconscious’ level that they have harmed themselves along with the person they have targeted with their fear, hatred, revenge, wrath or loathing.  So that person then needs to pay for harming them, they believe.  It becomes a very vicious cycle and depression is the price they pay for harming another and so themselves.

Depression Links to Destructive Critism

Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom. Aristotle

 
Since all any of us can know is what we know ourselves, which we can only learn from our own selves, because even if we are being taught by someone, we are still sifting everything through our own preconceptions, so it  becomes our own personal knowledge.  We cannot know who someone else is, because we are unable to get inside their heads and experience everything they have learnt which they sifted through their preconceived ideas.

It is for that reason that any time any one of us uses destructive criticism towards someone, you can be entirely sure that the critic is criticizing an aspect of him/herself which s/he is not happy about having.  

So any time you become brave enough to really learn about who you are,  all you need to do is listen to any destructive criticism you dish up. Constructive criticism, on the other hand, comes from a place of love.   Depressed people use destructive criticism all day unless they are catatonic, in my experience.

“Depression is one of the priority conditions covered by WHO’s Mental Health Gap Action Programme (mhGAP). The Programme aims to help countries increase services for people with mental, neurological and substance use disorders, through care provided by health workers who are not specialists in mental health. The Programme asserts that with proper care, psychosocial assistance and medication, tens of millions of people with mental disorders, including depression, could begin to lead normal lives – even where resources are scarce.”(WHO.int).

Depression shown in brain scan
The brain scans of a person with depression and a normal brain
Image credit: Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research.
Of course, pretty much everyone goes though such things as unemployment, bereavement and psychological trauma of some sort, but the worldwide figure for depression is not 7.4 billion.  So helping people with depression means helping them to see that All is One Consciousness, and it is Consciousness that the unconscious mind receives and the conscious mind either accepts or rejects.

Conclusion

It is our choices that will either cause a symmetry between the left and right hemispheres – or the conscious and unconscious minds – or the lack of symmetry seen in the brains of people who are depressed. Because we are all born with the knowledge of the difference between good and evil thoughts.