Depression: Not Just A Mental State? New Study Reveals It Can Be A Form Of Brain Damage

Depression is known as one of the leading causes of suicide and it is often perceived as a mental health illness. According to research, however, depression is more than just a mental health condition as it is being considered a form of brain damage.

It's been an ongoing debate as to whether depression is a physical condition or a mental state. As some would stand for depression as a mental health issue, some experts argue that it is in fact a type of brain damage. Thus, a person does not have a choice as to whether he can fight it off or not.

After years of study, researchers were finally able to state that depression has the capability to cause brain damage and not the other was around. Though it was originally a predisposition that brain damage is caused by chronic depression, researchers came up with a new study that gave a different point of view.

The study that was published in Molecular Psychiatry suggest that a team of experts have discovered a some interesting findings on the correlation between depression and brain damage. The results that were taken from 9,000 individual samples suggest that people who were diagnosed with depression experienced a shrink in their hypothalamus, compared to the control group in which 1,728 patients out of 7,199 healthy individuals were diagnosed with clinical depression.

Aside from labeling depression as a form of brain damage, some experts note that depression is a result of allergic reactions. The Guardian reports that scientists are considering the fact that depression can be triggered by the body's immune system. George Slavich, a clinical psychologist at the University of California in Los Angeles, has been focused on studying depression, wherein he highlighted that depression is not solely focused on the psychiatric condition but the physical aspect as well.

"I don't even talk about it as a psychiatric condition anymore," Slavich said. "It does involve psychology, but it also involves equal parts of biology and physical health."