I think it gets to be a "Which came first: the egg or the chicken?" kind of a quandary.

The trend in psychiatry is toward looking at it more and more as a neurological condition. Some psychiatrists prefer to be called neuropsychiatrists. Some psych facilities are being called Neuropsychiatric hospitals.

We do know that, if something affects you emotionally, there will be a change in you neurologically. Sometimes a temporary change and sometimes a permanent change. We also know that changes in the brain caused by certain kinds of strokes and other things (like certain forms of poisoning) can result in emotional depression. So it can go both ways.

I read that they studied Serotonin in the brains of monkeys. The monkey who is the top monkey in the group will have a higher level of Serotonin in his brain. The monkey who is low ranking and gets picked on by all the other monkeys will have a lower level of Serotonin in his brain. But here is the question: Did the alpha monkey get to the top because he has high serotonin, or did his serotonin level go up after he figured out how to be top monkey? Last I checked, nobody knows the answer.

In the study I read about, they sabotaged the top monkey, so he started failing at things. Then they checked his serotonin level and found that it had gone down. While they were purposely undermining him, another monkey got to be top monkey. When they checked his serotonin level, it had gone up - after he got to be top monkey.

Despite what a lot of pdocs will tell you, nobody on this earth knows whether the majority of depressed people are depressed because their brain chemistry is screwy, or because unfortunate things happened to them that may have caused their brain chemistry to change.

Every single thing that happens to you, and probably every thought you entertain in your mind, causes a change somewhere in your brain. Sometimes that change is a bad change and can be permanent, or hard to reverse.

If something pretty bad happens, or a bunch of bad stuff happens to you, like the monkey that got sabotaged, then is the resulting loss of self-esteem and lowered sense of well-being that you feel truly a neurological disorder? I'ld say yes and no. Maybe your brain chemistry is altered, and maybe some medication can compensate to help you feel better. On the other hand, I would say that depression is a product of your life history.

I know that, if someone is real nice to me, when I am depressed, I can wind up feeling a whole lot better. There's been times, in my life, when I went from feeling very depressed to not feeling depressed at all, after I was in an environment where I got treated really supportively, or had a chance to do something very successfully.