The stuff in your head and other stories

This is a great book. Peter D. Kramer writes a follow-up on his first hit book Listening to Prozac that came out in like -93 or something. Against Depression came out in 2005 and is just as a good sequel should be: more of everything. He writes about the latest new findings in neuropsychiatry and makes the statement that could be simplified as that the brain is like, perhaps like your spine: If you put a lot of stress on it it will get damaged and it will not be as strong as before.

That's the case with depression, prolonged stress causes excitotoxoligical effects on your neurons so they die... This means that there will be less brain mass to help you cope with stress in the future, which means that the same stress factors will cause more stress on you than it used to before the damage.

This also leads to a decline in all the feel-good neurotransmitting substances in your brain like serotonin, noradrenaline and dopamine. These signal substances will have less effect than before, which means, fun things won't "feel as fun" as they used to. The damage also fucks up your immune system by dysregulation of the HPA-axis, which is involved in immune regulation.

The damage is reversible but takes time to heal, and that's when you take antidepressants, they stop the damaging effects of stress (and lessens stress in itself too).

Anyways, enough of that. The good thing about these books is how the author (petey d) combines patients stories, examples from literature and hard-core science in a very readable format. It reads like a good fictionary novel almost, especially the parts about what role depression has had in culture during the last five hundred years or so.