Where Does Depression Stem From?

Where Does Depression Stem From?

Have you ever heard or seen on television that depression may be related to traumatic childhood experiences? Often times we see in the media patients suffering from depression looking back at their past and their childhood. Researchers at Leiden University Medical Center decided to do an experiment on mice and rats to see if this method is true. According to Enthoven the student researcher for this experiment, what they are trying to find out is the neural and molecular causes of depression which is an experiment they can not conduct on humans. Previous research has already shown that parent-child interaction is vital to a child’s development. Enthoven separated the mother from her baby mice for a longer than usual period of time and noticed distress among the babies until the mother returned. However after a few days of this similar treatment the baby mice did not even react. Enthoven concluded that the babies learned that the mother would soon return eventually.

In the next step of the experiment Enthoven compared three groups of baby mice under different conditions. The first group was composed of separated five-day old mice that were put in new cages alone for a period of thirty minutes. There was no reaction with this experiment. The next group had the same conditions except these mice were separated from their mother for eight hours before being put in the new cages and these mice reacted in distress. The third group had the same conditions as the mice from the second group except they additionally had been isolated on two days earlier. To the researcher’s surprise this group reacted to the final thirty minutes in their new cage with distress, but not to the eight hours before. The final thirty minutes was apparently the last straw. Six months later these same mice were put through the same experiment and were compared to mice that had never experienced these childhood traumas. Enthoven concluded that when compared the mice that experienced childhood trauma surely developed differently. Enthoven states that, “Repeated stress situations affect the corticosteron in the body and this in turn has an adverse effect on the development of the brain.” Enthoven explains that corticosteron “…Affects cognitive capacity and memory function.” Unfortunately this data can not be used to make speculations about the human brain development, at least quite yet, but definitely supports the theory that our childhood interactions have a great influence on our development.