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Walking or running each day will always help, but for a moderate to severe depression, exercise alone isn’t enough. The benefits of exercise as a treatment depend on the severity of the depression. Exercise reduces cortisol and increases a critical protein, called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, that is necessary to grow healthy brain cells, called neurogenesis. Several studies have found that exercise can be effective as medication or talk therapy for mild to moderate depression. In your book, you’ve written about exercise as both a form of prevention and treatment for depression. An anti-inflammatory diet may help to prevent those illnesses associated with inflammation, including depression, but it isn’t a form of treatment. You can’t blueberry your way out of a depression! Nor will a detox enema help. If blueberries are anti-inflammatory, will eating them help someone who is depressed? Looking at inflammation, and the relationship between cortisol, glial cells, and neurotransmitters helps us understand what is happening in the brain and body.

Glial cells regulate neurotransmitter levels too. It’s not that we have abandoned the theory of a causal connection between depression and neurotransmitters such as serotonin and norepinephrine, but we now realize that the brain is much more complex and there are multiple factors involved. Is the focus on inflammation merely a new version of this? The theory that depression was caused by low levels of brain serotonin (called the “chemical imbalance theory”) was popular in the 1990s and early 2000s, but has been largely discredited. This is why a person who has an inflammatory disorder such as heart disease or arthritis is more likely to develop depression. Chronic stress causes an inflammatory cascade, leading to an increased likelihood of developing diseases linked to inflammation, and those inflammatory disorders increase the risk of depression. We believe inflammation is a critical factor in the mind-body connection. Heart disease, HIV, lupus, arthritis, diabetes, obesity, chronic pain and several forms of cancer have also been called inflammatory disorders. Chronic stress causes the body to produce high levels of cortisol, which can lead to depression, but depression itself ramps up the cortisol, which worsens the depression.ĭepression isn’t the only illness found to be caused by inflammation. If cortisol is a key culprit, is stress a leading cause of depression?

They damage the glial cells, which causes them to release more cytokines, causing an inflammatory cascade. Instead, they start spitting out proteins called pro-inflammatory cytokines. Too much cortisol causes the glial cells to stop working properly. Depression can provoke chronically high levels of cortisol, the hormone that we produce when under stress. These are the brain’s caretakers: they supply the neurons with nutrients and oxygen, protect the brain from infections, and clean up the brain’s waste products, such as dead neurons. To understand what inflammation is and how it causes depression, you need to understand the role of the brain’s glial cells. In your book, you say that depression should be considered an inflammatory illness. She spoke to The Globe and Mail about cortisol, blueberry cures and why talking to someone is always a good idea. Diane McIntosh, a Vancouver-based psychiatrist, and assistant professor at the University of British Columbia and author of the new book, This is Depression: A Comprehensive, Compassionate Guide for Anyone who Wants to Understand Depression. One of Canada’s leading proponents of this thesis is Dr. The idea is that chronic stress causes hormonal dysregulation, and this leads to depression and other inflammatory disorders, such as arthritis, lupus, heart disease and even some forms of cancer. Now, a new theory about the cause of depression has emerged: That it is a disease caused by the body’s immune system. Canada has the world’s fourth-highest use of these drugs, according to a recent study from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. At the same time, so too has the consumption of antidepressants. Rates of depression have risen by more than 18-per-cent worldwide since 2005, according to the World Health Organization. This viewpoint helped reduce the stigma around mental illness, but did not provide a cure-all. The idea that depression might be caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain – and not a moral failing – grew in popularity with the invention of the drug Prozac in the late ‘80s, and later with the marketing of this and other antidepressants.