Reflection on Depression

Immediate mood booster - humor

I highly recommend viewing addictive internet memes, bromance comedies, and hilarious photos of badly dressed people at Walmart as a form of complementary medicine. It sounds obvious, but humor is a treatment I didn't consciously embrace until recently. 

I've always loved being around funny people, but now that I'm a lawyer my day is fairly solitary. It turns out that internet humor is just the seasoning I need to prevent my good mood from withering during an emotionally bland day. After an hour or two of reading cases, 10 minutes reading lamebook or epic fail provides a nice mental break and emotional refresher. It's really hard not to smile when seeing the crazy stuff that people do.

I don't want to make anyone who is so depressed that they can't read or watch TV feel guilty for not being able to appreciate a joke. Like exercise, humor isn't effective when morbidly depressed. But if you're doing pretty well, then reading the funnies may help keep your spirits up.

I feel a small pang of guilt whenever I use humor that comes at someone else's expense. I'm pretty sure viewing "People of Walmart" everyday will land me in hell, but at least I'll be laughing all the way there. Plus, I try to laugh at myself just as much -- this week during my training session I did a bunch of lunges, and then tried (unsuccessfully) to jog up a set of stairs.  The lunges worked my legs so hard that when my brain signaled my leg muscles to move up the stairs, the muscles didn't respond. My upper body, on the other hand, got the message and lurched forward without its bottom half.  I ended up landing on my face while my legs buckled underneath me. Confused, I pulled myself up by the railing and tried a second time to run up the stairs.  And I fell on my face, again. It was pretty funny and would have made a hilarious clip titled "Going Upstairs--FAIL".

Dwight Schrute's depression cure

Maybe Dwight was on to something when he suggested hand de-sanitizing stations in an episode of The Office a few weeks ago. Modern coddled immune systems may explain why depression is more common in younger cohorts than in older folks who grew up exposed to more bacteria.

Is depression increasing because we are no longer exposed to the right bacteria?

On a more serious note, research examining the relationship between inflammation and depression has gotten a lot of publicity recently. One line of research is looking at the role of cytokines (molecules produced during an inflammatory response which act on the brain) in causing depression in patients who suffer from chronic inflammatory diseases.

Another line of investigation posits that depression may result from brain inflammation caused by a normal neural remodeling process gone awry. 

My first episode of depression was preceded by mono--something my parents and some doctors remained convinced triggered its onset. I don't think that's the whole story (I suspect I also had some underlying vulnerability), but it's an intriguing possibility.