A recent study indicates that clinically depressed people have a harder time than their healthy counterparts in controlling their emotional response to negative situations. Depressed and non-depressed subjects were given troublesome images to view; they had to try to consciously turn their negative responses around by thinking of the situation in a different light (e.g., imagining a happier ending or thinking of it as acted and not real).
For the healthy subjects, their efforts were reflected in both an upswing in activity in the prefrontal cortex, in areas associated with control of the emotions, and a downswing in activity in the amygdala and other areas where the emotions are processed. In a sense, the researchers could see them stepping on the emotional brakes and also see the emotional machinery slowing down. In the depressed people, on the other hand, you could see them stepping on the brakes (more activity in the prefrontal cortex), but the amygdala didn’t slow down. This press release from EurekAlert has the details.
The next step, I hope, will be to find out what’s happening differently in the brains of the depressed to stymie the efforts at emotional control. This obviously has a lot of potential for helping to find or improve treatments for depression. I’ve had experience with being clinically depressed, and I’d certainly find it interesting to know if something like this is going on in my brain when I’m depressed.
I’m familiar with the frustrating feeling of being haunted by lingering sadness or anxiety despite my best efforts to reason my way out of it or reassure myself (or be reassured by others), or even just to accept that sometimes life is sad and move on. Sometimes the sadness feels like bedrock; even if it’s inexplicable why it should be there, any efforts to convince myself that it’s not there or not warranted seem delusional. I’ve found that the best thing is to seek out the things that I know have comforted me in the past (time with people I love, music or words that have great meaning for me, long walks, time among the trees in a favorite park) and trust that they will work their slow subtle magic no matter how pointless it may feel in the moment.
[Postscript, December 28, 2023: These days I’d question the entire idea of emotional control and reasoning yourself out of feelings. I’m not sure I understand emotions any better than I did in 2007, but I certainly understand them differently.]
