Your B12 Levels Are Low
Vitamin B12 is found in animal products, so vegans and vegetarians are most at risk for being deficient, as well as people with gastrointestinal issues, who may have difficulty absorbing the vitamin, and people on heartburn and reflux medications. The important vitamin is needed in order to make red blood cells and DNA and plays a major role in nerve function and mood. B12 helps to maintain the myelin sheath surrounding nerve cells, which make it possible for cells to communicate.
But when levels are low, this communication becomes compromised, which can lead to neurological changes. B12 is also involved in the production of serotonin and other neurotransmitters that regulate mood, so low levels could cause changes in the nervous system.
One study in the journal BMC Psychiatry followed 115 people with depression for six months and found that those with higher levels of B12 had a greater chance of recovery from depression, leading scientists to believe there is an association between B12 and mental health. Low levels of B12 have even been linked to .
Risk Factors That Can Make You More Vulnerable
Depression most often results from a combination of factors, rather than one single cause. For example, if you went through a divorce, were diagnosed with a serious medical condition, or lost your job, the stress could prompt you to start drinking more, which in turn could cause you to withdraw from family and friends. Those factors combined could then trigger depression.
The following are examples of risk factors that can make you more susceptible:
Loneliness and isolation. Theres a strong relationship between loneliness and depression. Not only can lack of social support heighten your risk, but having depression can cause you to withdraw from others, exacerbating feelings of isolation. Having close friends or family to talk to can help you maintain perspective on your issues and avoid having to deal with problems alone.
. While a network of strong and supportive relationships can be crucial to good mental health, troubled, unhappy, or abusive relationships can have the opposite effect and increase your risk for depression.
Recent stressful life experiences. Major life changes, such as a bereavement, divorce, unemployment, or financial problems can often bring overwhelming levels of stress and increase your risk of developing depression.
Chronic illness or pain. Unmanaged pain or being diagnosed with a serious illness, such as cancer, heart disease, or diabetes, can trigger feelings of hopelessness and helplessness.
How Is Depression Syndrome Diagnosed
Everyone may feel sad or down from time to time. However, clinical depression has more intense symptoms that last two weeks or longer.
To determine whether you have clinical depression, your healthcare provider will ask questions. You may complete a questionnaire and provide a family history. Your healthcare provider may also perform an exam or order lab tests to see if you have another medical condition.
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Ways You Can Look After Yourself
If youre depressed, there are steps you can take to lift your mood and help your recovery. These steps can help if youve been depressed in the past and want to stay well.
- Talk about how youre feeling. Talking to someone you trust, or finding peer support, can help you feel better and less alone.
- Eat well. A healthy diet can lift your mood and maintain your mental health.
- Stay physically active. Exercise may feel like the last thing you want to do, but it can ease the symptoms of depression. Research suggests it may be as effective as antidepressants in helping you feel better.
- Spend time in nature. Research shows that being in nature can make us feel happier, feel our lives are more worthwhile, and reduce our levels of depression
- Avoid cigarettes and alcohol. They may feel like theyre helping at first, but they make things worse in the long run.
- Try talking therapy to stay well. NICE guidelines recommend CBT or mindfulness-based cognitive therapy if youve been depressed in the past.
Symptoms Of Anxiety In Men
Anxiety is more than having sweaty palms and butterflies in your stomach. Symptoms of anxiety can include ongoing feelings of worry, fear and impending doom that are so severe they interfere with your ability to work, maintain relationships and get a decent nights sleep. Physical signs of anxiety may include:
- pounding or racing heart
- thinking about death or suicide.
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Different Types Of Depression
Your doctor may diagnose you with depression and say that its mild, moderate or severe depending on your symptoms and how severe they are. Or you may be diagnosed with a specific type of depression, such as:
- dysthymia mild depression that lasts for several years
- seasonal affective disorder depression that comes and goes in a seasonal pattern
- postnatal depression depression that many parents experience after having a baby. Some people experience antenatal depression during pregnancy.
Do I Need Health Insurance To Receive This Service
The referral service is free of charge. If you have no insurance or are underinsured, we will refer you to your state office, which is responsible for state-funded treatment programs. In addition, we can often refer you to facilities that charge on a sliding fee scale or accept Medicare or Medicaid. If you have health insurance, you are encouraged to contact your insurer for a list of participating health care providers and facilities.
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Chronic Pain And Depression Link
Researchers are still trying to identify exactly how chronic pain is linked to depression. Body aches are a common depression symptom. This may be because people with the mental health disorder have higher levels cytokines than those without depression. Cytokines are involved in sending messages within the body related to how the immune system responds to infection and damage. In someone struggling with depression, their overabundance may promote inflammation as an immune response, and that inflammation causes pain. However, chronic pain also increases the likelihood of depression. The presence of persistent pain can make you feel alone and isolated. Depending on the condition youre living with, you may even be immobile and need to rely on others to do tasks you used to do yourself. Research supports the idea that chronic pain contributes to depression. One review of numerous studies found that chronic pain patients report higher levels of depression than healthy controls. In particular, the painful condition fibromyalgia may be closely linked to depression. While researchers are still trying to pinpoint the exact cause, some evidence suggests that people with the disorder, which causes muscle pain and tenderness, have heightened sensitivity in the brain to both emotional changes and physical discomfort.
How Is Genetics Linked To The Risk Of Depression
We know that depression can sometimes run in families. This suggests that there’s at least a partial genetic link to depression. Children, siblings, and parents of people with severe depression are somewhat more likely to have depression than are members of the general population. Multiple genes interacting with one another in special ways probably contribute to the various types of depression that run in families. Yet despite the evidence of a family link to depression, it is unlikely that there is a single “depression” gene, but rather, many genes that each contribute small effects toward depression when they interact with the environment.
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Disconnection From Intrinsic Motivation
How much you enjoy your work life also depends on whether youre intrinsically or extrinsically motivated to do the work itself. Intrinsic motivation is what drives you to do things purely for the joy of them. If you love running and spend all your free time doing it, youre acting on intrinsic motivation. On the other hand, extrinsic motivation is a means to an end: If you hate running but keep doing it because youre trying to lose weight, thats extrinsic motivation. Youre not doing it for the joy of the activity itselfyoure doing it for the payoff.
Todays culture emphasizes extrinsic motivation because we base our definition of success on external milestoneslike climbing the corporate ladder, getting married, buying a house, and so on. The logic is that meeting those milestones is the only way to be successful, and being successful is the only way to be happy. You may not love the actual day-to-day routine of your job, but you stick with it because it pays well, carries a fancy title, and makes it possible to buy that nice house. The job itself is just the means to achieve that goal.
What Does Traditional Medicine Say Is The Cause
The causes are many when it comes to anxiety, depression, and stress. Traditional medicine has this to say:
WebMD: The cause of anxiety disorders is unknown. They go on to say many of these disorders are caused by a combination of factors, including changes in the brain and environmental stress.
Mayo Clinic is similarly vague: The causes of anxiety disorders arent fully understood. Life experiences appear to trigger anxiety disorders in people who are already prone to anxiety. Inherited traits also can be a factor.
How do you feel about being told you have a health condition for which there is no known cause? Its a bit discouraging, to say the least. Especially when its a problem that impacts your day in and day out, affecting your very ability to function in life.
Anxiety, depression, and stress can affect your interactions with friends, family, coworkers, and impact your ability to achieve your goals in life.
Here at Root Cause Medical Clinic we are not in agreement there is no cause in fact, quite the contrary. Below you will see a list of potential causes, all of which can be addressed. Im happy to say we have excellent success in treating anxiety, depression, stress, and mood swings utilizing Root Cause Medicine. Our program works and utilizes no dangerous psychiatric drugs.
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Diagnosing And Treating Depression
There’s no physical test for depression.
If you experience depression symptoms most of the day, every day, for more than two weeks, you should visit your GP. This is especially important if:
- you have symptoms of depression that aren’t getting any better
- you have thoughts of self-harm or suicide
- your work, relationships with friends and family, or interests are affected by your mood
It can be hard for people with depression to imagine that anything can help them but the sooner you seek help, the sooner the symptoms start to get better.
Your GP may examine you and perform blood or urine tests to make sure there isn’t another condition causing your depression symptoms, like an underactive thyroid.
When you see your GP, they’ll try to find out if you have depression by asking you questions. These are likely to be about your health, how you’re feeling, and how that is affecting you mentally and physically.
Telling your doctor your symptoms and the affect they are having on you will help your GP to tell if you have depression, and how severe the condition is. It’s important to be as open as possible.
Your conversation with your GP will be confidential. This rule can only be broken if your GP thinks there is a significant risk of harm to you or others, and that telling a family member or carer would make that risk lower.
Why Does Anxiety So Often Occur With Depression
Depression and anxiety share much in commonthey both derive from overresponsiveness of the negative affect system, the distinguishing feature of the personality trait of neuroticism. People with the trait of neuroticism tend to react to experience most readily and most strongly with negative emotions, such as irritability, anger, and sadness. Many of the same brain regions malfunction in both conditions, most notably the amygdala and prefrontal cortex . But there are important differences. Anxiety is an alarm intended to energize people to avoid possible future danger they sense depression shuts people down when they feel overwhelmed, disinclining them to ongoing activity and focusing their attention on losses and other negative experiences in the past. Stress can trigger both responses. And anxiety itself can lead to depression. In fact, nearly 70 percent of people who suffer from depression also have anxiety, and 50 percent of those with anxiety have clinical depression.
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Heres What A Root Cause Medicine Doctor Will Do For You:
First, an extensive history is performed very extensive. We ask questions about your stress level, sleep hours, food preferences and cravings, digestive symptoms, any hormonal imbalance symptoms, exercise schedule, and a great deal more.
Based on an extensive history, examination, and our knowledge of getting to the underlying root cause, we begin to get an idea of what might be the problem. This hypothesis will be borne out by functional and traditional lab tests, as required.
What Root Cause Medicine appreciates is that anxiety, depression, stress, and mood swings actually mean an imbalance or imbalances, plural. The list of causes above gives you an idea of what might be underlying your symptoms.
Once we have diagnosed the root cause, we get to work correcting each and every one of them. We have discovered these underlying causes by working with patients for over 25 years. The process does not need to belong, even if you have suffered for a long time, and it involves no dangerous drugs.
It never ceases to delight me how willing the body is to heal itself once you provide for it the correct tools.
I cant tell you how many new patients I see, who have suffered for years with anxiety, depression, stress, and mood swings, but have been given no solution. When the body is provided the right solution, it will heal.
If I were to give you the top 3 most common causes we find it would be:
Are There Risk Factors For Depression
While genetics is believed to confer some susceptibility, there is no single gene or set of genes implicated so far, it appears that a very large number of geneslikely modifiable by diet or behavioreach contributes a very tiny degree of vulnerability that could precipitate depression under conditions of stress. People can also be at risk of depression because of their personality attributes, particularly if they have a tendency to worry a lot, have low self-esteem, are perfectionists, are sensitive to personal criticism, or are self-critical and negative. Of the Big Five personality dimensions, the one most consistently associated with depression susceptibility is the trait of neuroticism. It denotes the degree to which the negative affect system is readily activated. People high in trait neuroticism are inclined to find experiences distressing, to worry, and to doubt themselves disproportionate to the circumstances they are in. In addition, studies indicate that women are at especially high risk for depression after divorce and men are at high risk following following financial, occupational, or legal problems.
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How Is Biology Related To Depression
Researchers have noted differences in the brains of people who have clinical depression compared with those who do not. For instance, the hippocampus, a small part of the brain that is vital to the storage of memories, appears to be smaller in some people with a history of depression than in those who’ve never been depressed. A smaller hippocampus has fewer serotonin receptors. Serotonin is one of many brain chemicals known as neurotransmitters that allow communication across circuits that connect the brain regions involved in processing emotions.
Scientists do not know why the hippocampus may be smaller in some people with depression. Some researchers have found that the stress hormone cortisol is produced in excess in depressed people. These investigators believe that cortisol has a toxic or “shrinking” effect on the development of the hippocampus. Some experts think depressed people may be simply born with a smaller hippocampus and are thus inclined to have depression. There are many other brain regions, and pathways between specific regions, thought to be involved with depression, and likely, no single brain structure or pathway fully accounts for clinical depression.
Can You Prevent Depression From Happening
While theres no surefire way to prevent depression, one of the greatest protective factors for depression is social connection and social support, Dr. Stern adds. Maintaining healthy friendships and relationships, she says, can potentially significantly decrease the likelihood or severity of depression. Whats more, the chance that an individual will receive care for symptoms of depression is often based on their social situation, Dr. Murrough says. Friends or family notice that someones not themselves, having trouble getting out of bed, and missing activities and appointments, and will help them seek care. Someone whos relatively isolated may be at risk for not getting treatment, and in turn, fall into deeper depression. The key? Nurture your relationships and encourage each other to talk openly about your feelings, without judgment. The more we can de-stigmatize emotions, the more we can help prevent or slow down the progression of negative emotions to depressive symptoms, says Dr. Stern.
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Supporting Someone With Anxiety Or Depression
There are ways that you can help someone with anxiety or depression. It may be helpful to:
- let them know if youve noticed a change in their behaviour
- spend time talking about their experiences and let them know youre there to listen without being judgmental
- help them to get information from a website, library or community health centre
- suggest they go to a doctor or health professional, and help them to make an appointment
- offer to go with them to their appointment and follow up with them afterwards
- encourage them to get enough sleep, to exercise and to eat well
- encourage family and friends to invite them out and keep in touch, but dont pressure them to participate in activities
- contact a doctor or hospital if they become a threat to themselves or others.
It is unhelpful to:
- put pressure on them by telling them to snap out of it or get their act together
- stay away or avoid them
- tell them they just need to stay busy or get out more
- pressure them to party more or wipe out how theyre feeling with drugs and alcohol
- assume the problem will just go away.
If you or someone you know needs support, talk to a doctor or other health professional about getting appropriate treatment.