Nerdy Science Blog

This is a guest post from Cognitive Therapy Associates (CTA).

“Unemployed and depressed, I have been living off of my girlfriend for months. The relationship isn’t going well. She screams at me daily to get a job and I tell her I’m working on it.

Unfortunately, that is now a lie. I have given up looking for a job long since. I spend my days watching television and eating my girlfriends food. When I know she is on her way back home, I make an escape for a couple hours before returning - this lends credibility to the lie.

For whatever reason, I can’t make myself move forward; this is depressing. Covering my tracks with lies makes me more depressed. I think the extent of my depression is so bad I believe I have brain damage; holes in my cortex like Swiss cheese.

I almost wish I could become a drug addict but drugs, I’ve long learned, don’t function on me like they do others, whether the drugs are for recreational use or prescribed by a doctor, they only make me feel physically ill on top of my sorrow. This is all the more depressing.

It rained today and I realized I had worn holes in the bottom of my only pair of shoes. Good grief! In my shoes, I feel like Charlie Brown would have killed himself! But even suicide is a depressing thought; I am such a coward I could never pull off an ending found so noble by honored cultures of the past. The Japanese samurai had seppuku. The ancient Roman Marc Antony and his Queen, the sensuous Cleopatra, had righteous suicides.

I am neither a noble warrior nor someone defending my love and honor. Suicide would not be sufficiently tragic for my depravity.”

Does this sound like you or someone you know? Perhaps, but fortunately for those who are severely depressed, and are opposed to using pharmaceutical aid on combating their ailments, psychological therapy has been proven, with scientific and empirical evidence, to physically alter the brain.

Depressed lab rats - err, I mean people - were given PET scans to render levels of brain activity prior to treatment. The treatment itself is ‘Cognitive Behavioral Therapy’ (CBT), essentially a method that identifies and helps a person to correct specific errors in what he or she is thinking that produces negative or painful feelings. Dr. Conner, a professional at CBT, says that “intervention for depression takes place at the level of conscious thought”. After 15-20 therapy sessions, the depressed showed improvement in disposition but more importantly PET scans revealed changes in brain chemistry similar to those expressed by drugs and other antidepressants.

With this study, we truly have a case of “mind over matter“.