Sapolsky on Depression and Schizophrenia

serenesam

serenesam

Banned
MBTI
INTJ
Professor Robert Sapolsky of Standford Univerity is an amazing guy. I really enjoyed his lectures on depression and schizophrenia. It
 
Oh, I forgot to mention, this guy can teach. :)
 
i started watching the depression one but i have to go to bed and will watch it over coming days. but it looks good. the way that depression is treated by society does interest me. i had a major depressive illness, with psychotic features, that i suffered from on and off in a degenderative sort of way for about a decade before it began to be treated, and which subsequently lead to three hospitalisations. i was extremely ill, it was very crippling, and it has taken the best years of my life and a lot of hard work to recover from. i believe that it also caused lasting damage to my brain, although i'm sure most people would find that idea ridiculous. it has been and remains very difficult to communicate to people how sick i was. it is extremely difficult for them to understand that the experience of having it was for me the way that they imagine cancer to be for a cancer sufferer. the condition was excruciating on every level including physical, the pain was shocking and intolerable so that i was often weeping or screaming with it, i was bedridden for months at a time without being able to sleep more than three hours in one go, the courses of treatment were painful and difficult and demanding. people who have suffered from minor or more environmental type depressions also don't understand how it was for me, just that they are often convinced that they do. it made my life very difficult and it almost killed me, i was dying. if i had lived in a previous century when treatments were not what they are now i would have been killed by it. it took constant and intensive work every day for 7 years to recover from. although i have turned the corner now, i am still recovering. if this had never happened to me i would probably have taken two undergraduate degrees and a phd by now - things which my oldest and closest friends have done, instead i barely managed to drag myself through a 3 year bachelors degree over a period of ten years. i'm happy with my life and who i am, but things could have been very different for me if this hadn't happened.
 
Hi serenesam!

Both he and Dr. Mate' were very informative when they spoke in the Zeitgeist movie you posted. I was moved by what Dr. Mate' said and I went searching for more videos by him. There are only a few on youtube - but his knowledge helped open my mind. I found him inspiring and his words resonated deeply in me as truth. Well - my truth.

I will download these to my phone (I don't have enough bandwidth on my meager satellite account to watch on my computer) and look at them tonight.
I'm excited to see what Professor Sapolsky has to say!

Both of these gentleman add pieces of the puzzle of the system of humanity.

"Depression is as real as diabetes". Of course it is. Our society needs to learn a Human is a System. It is a collection of subsystems continuously interacting with each other with the goal in mind to survive. The brain is one end of a long nerve called the spinal cord. It may be bigger at the brain end - but it is still only one big nerve - right? Then there are all of the other nerves which branch off of the spinal nerve and travel all throughout the body. If one understands the permeability of cell membranes then why shouldn't the chemicals we put into our stomach along with the food we bought at the fast food joint affect our brain via the nerves connected to the stomach lining - the spinal cord - and then up to the brain? It's not as if the brain has it's own apartment up in the penthouse and sends orders down via the penthouse phone system - right? And it goes the other way too. When the brain is made aware of some potential for danger - signals are sent to various glands to make fear chemicals. The human is not meant to have these chemicals cascading throughout our body day after day hour after hour. The chemicals cause damage over time to the body.

Now to me - that sounds like diabetes. Chemicals causing damage to cell tissue.

I'll be glad when the people who are unaware of these concepts learn this. There might be more compassion for the mentally ill. There might be more understanding of how violence - in ANY format - affects all of us.

Thanks for finding these!

Namaste
 
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Just watched these and they're great! Thanks for posting.
 
invisible said:
i started watching the depression one but i have to go to bed and will watch it over coming days. but it looks good. the way that depression is treated by society does interest me. i had a major depressive illness, with psychotic features, that i suffered from on and off in a degenderative sort of way for about a decade before it began to be treated, and which subsequently lead to three hospitalisations. i was extremely ill, it was very crippling, and it has taken the best years of my life and a lot of hard work to recover from. i believe that it also caused lasting damage to my brain, although i'm sure most people would find that idea ridiculous.
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Yes, one of the most fundamental rules (including some experts themselves) seems to be dismissed or not looked upon more thoroughly (as I have talked about before I believe) is the notion that correlation does not equal causation. Your belief that your depression may have also caused damage to your brain is not as lunatic as some people would suggest. All of our experiences contribute to the way our brain grows and evolves. The average person seems to think that only brain damage can cause aberrant or abnormal behavior. They assume that brain damage must be the independent variable when this is not necessarily always the case.

it has been and remains very difficult to communicate to people how sick i was. it is extremely difficult for them to understand that the experience of having it was for me the way that they imagine cancer to be for a cancer sufferer. the condition was excruciating on every level including physical, the pain was shocking and intolerable so that i was often weeping or screaming with it, i was bedridden for months at a time without being able to sleep more than three hours in one go, the courses of treatment were painful and difficult and demanding. people who have suffered from minor or more environmental type depressions also don't understand how it was for me,
Click to expand...

I think the word depression has been used so many times to the point where its true definition has been skewed. People who have suffered from minor depression in my opinion do not really have Major Depressive Disorder. There needs to be significant impairment and/or distress. I mean, who doesn't have depression if one were to ask what depression is from its basic denotative definition in the dictionary (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/depression)? From that narrow-minded perspective, I would assume that most people have suffered from depression because to be depressed or sad is normal. If you did not feel sad or depressed, would that be normal? That lack of feeling may question what constitutes normal?

just that they are often convinced that they do. it made my life very difficult and it almost killed me, i was dying. if i had lived in a previous century when treatments were not what they are now i would have been killed by it. it took constant and intensive work every day for 7 years to recover from. although i have turned the corner now, i am still recovering. if this had never happened to me i would probably have taken two undergraduate degrees and a phd by now - things which my oldest and closest friends have done, instead i barely managed to drag myself through a 3 year bachelors degree over a period of ten years. i'm happy with my life and who i am, but things could have been very different for me if this hadn't happened.
Click to expand...

The point is at least you pulled through it. I think it is wonderful you bring attention to this matter so it wouldn't simply just be one of those issues overlooked as if it is non-existent.
 
Kgal said:
Both of these gentleman add pieces of the puzzle of the system of humanity.
Click to expand...

Did you know you just used the word “of” four times in one sentence?

"Depression is as real as diabetes". Of course it is. Our society needs to learn a Human is a System. It is a collection of subsystems continuously interacting with each other with the goal in mind to survive. The brain is one end of a long nerve called the spinal cord. It may be bigger at the brain end - but it is still only one big nerve - right? Then there are all of the other nerves which branch off of the spinal nerve and travel all throughout the body. If one understands the permeability of cell membranes then why shouldn't the chemicals we put into our stomach along with the food we bought at the fast food joint affect our brain via the nerves connected to the stomach lining - the spinal cord - and then up to the brain? It's not as if the brain has it's own apartment up in the penthouse and sends orders down via the penthouse phone system - right? And it goes the other way too. When the brain is made aware of some potential for danger - signals are sent to various glands to make fear chemicals. The human is not meant to have these chemicals cascading throughout our body day after day hour after hour. The chemicals cause damage over time to the body.
Click to expand...

Yes! And then this in turn causes damage to the brain. :)
 
This guy is great. I've begun watching the entire series for his course in behavioral biology. This is the stuff I live for.
 
Informative, but my mother is schizophrenic and no film is a substitute for experience. I love her and I'm happy she's alive. Now my father... well... he was... interesting....
 
AzulSoul said:
Informative, but my mother is schizophrenic and no film is a substitute for experience. I love her and I'm happy she's alive. Now my father... well... he was... interesting....
Click to expand...

Well, there are many kinds of schizophrenia but the subtypes are being dropped in the upcoming DSM-V (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSM-5). I read somewhere that some experts even see schizoaffective disorder and schizophrenia as being alike but not all experts agree to this. Though ultimately, I don't really think it matters because labels are used to differentiate the types and kinds of behaviors. In the words of John Nash - "I'm not sure that the word schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder . . . there's truly a spectrum. There's two ends and a roadway between them. And some of the same medicines may be similarly effective in either categories."

Here's a great article seeing the link between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder: http://news.yahoo.com/genes-linked-schizophrenia-bipolar-disorder-162401537.html

Here's another one on autism, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2784305/

Dr. Kay Jamison is also a very inspiring woman with bipolar disorder: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kay_Redfield_Jamison

Even major depressive disorder, is also known as unipolar disorder..........
 
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