When I was looking through the health section in New Scientist, the article “The world looks different if you’re depressed” catches my interest. Jessica Hamzelou gives the new information that I never known before about depression.
According to the article, depressed people don’t naturally have a neurotransmitter, which is a chemical substance in the brain, called GABA. This chemical has been related to a visual skill called “spatial suppression” (¶ 2), which helps us discriminate details surrounding the object. Julie Golomb, at Yale University, did the experiment with 32 people to watch “a brief computer animation” (¶ 3) and reply the way of moving. She found that the volunteers who recently recovered from depression had a worse response than the other group. While when the image was bigger, their responses improved. Therefore, she concludes that depressed people’s ability to discriminate fine details was impaired.
Depression is one of the most common mood disorders today. I think this article provides important information not only for the medical profession, but also the patients and their relatives who suffer from depression. The spatial suppression skill is a necessary perception that we use everyday to survive such as identification aspects, figures, colors and movement of things. Moreover we use it to detect the difference between objects to avoid dangerous things and animals. Thus this visual defect of depressed people can directly affect their daily lives. It is a good idea to give them a perception training besides drug therapy. I think this visual skill is like other skills that we can improve if we practice more such as writing and reading skill. Therefore doctors should help patients to improve their spatial suppression skill; even though: they recovered from depression by using only medicines.
Now, when you know people who suffer from depression, don’t misunderstand them if they see the world differently from you.
References
Hamzelou, J.(2009, November 30). The world looks different if you’re depressed. New Scientist. Retrieved December 1, 2009 from http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427365.000-the-world-looks-different-if-youre-depressed.html
Tuesday 1 December 2009
2 comments:
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It could be a good excuse for those who are being depressed and behave badly.
ReplyDeleteActually, I was thinking something similar to what An's comment suggests as I was reading Pin's post.
ReplyDeleteIt's another piece of research that suggests that purely physical activity in our brains fully determines everything that we feel, think and do. If that is so, is it fair to blame people when they "behave badly" as An put it?