The Neuroscience of Depression with Neil deGrasse Tyson

So if you find yourself kind of empty and feeling like, wow, all these people seem really happy and I'm just acting that way, you might be a good candidate to talk to a doctor about something that's good, baby. Something that can help you out is what I'm saying.

This is StarTalk Special Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. And as you know, for a special edition, we have Gary O'Reilly. Gary, how are you doing, man? Hey, Neil. I'm good, man. Thank you. And of course, we got Chuck. Chuck, how are you doing, man?

Hey. I'm doing well, man. Thanks for asking.

Today, we're going to talk about something I don't think we've talked about before. We're going to talk about depression, something that we all know about. It afflicts so many of us. And Gary, how did you put this show together?

Well, we started off thinking about seasonal depression because, you know, we're recording this, it's January, and it just makes everybody feel less vibrant. And then we realized that, you know what, there's more to this and we have to go way deeper than the winter blues.

Wait a minute. So that seasonal depression, they made that into an acronym, the Seasonal Affective Disorder. Which is sad. Sad. Yeah, okay, go on.

So there you go. We asked ourselves, what's the difference between anxiety and depression? Is it all about your serotonin levels? How do other cultures cope with seasonal depression? Do we need to be sad to actually learn to feel good? How much low-level depression in society actually causes goes undiagnosed and unnoticed.

We have the questions, but.

We didn't have the answers, which is why we needed an expert.

Oh, I know what expert we get for this.

Oh, yes, we do.

Oh, yeah. Where's the cheerings and the crap?

Our returning champion. Yay!

There you go. A returning neuro champion, Heather Berlin. Heather, welcome back to StarTalk.

Hey, thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure.

Okay, you're not only a great friend of the show, you've been on a bajillion times. You are also a neuroscientist. We've done so many shows on the brain. You're also a clinical psychologist, importantly for this episode. Clinical, which means you see patients, right?

Yeah.

And you're also Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai, New York. So welcome back to StarTalk on this very important subject.

Thank you.

So we just got to start at the bottom or the top or start at the front door. What is depression?

What is depression? Well, depression can mean many things and there are various sort of configurations. But when I think most people are talking about depression, they're talking about what we would call major depressive disorder, or often it's if somebody has what's called a major depressive episode. And we define that as it's lasting at least two weeks You have to have significant depressed mood, loss of interest in pleasurable things. You sometimes end up eating more or eating less.

So change in your eating pattern, change in your sleeping pattern. You might be sleeping more or sleeping less. And there's various other symptoms, but usually it's just having this very pervasive sense of sort of hopelessness. Maybe you lose energy, you're less motivated. And the things that used to make you feel better, good or happy or bring you pleasure don't bring you pleasure anymore.

Why two weeks? That feels so arbitrary.

Well, you know, we all have various fluctuations in our mood and we sometimes have depressed days, days where you don't feel like getting out of bed. You don't feel motivated. You just, I can't feel this pervasive feeling of maybe sadness, loneliness, isolation.

You'd call that normal.

Yeah. I mean, everybody has fluctuations in mood and that's, that's normal. It's okay to feel sadness. I mean, sadness, is a feeling that evolved over time. And, you know, there are reasons to be sad in life, right? You know, and you might have something really tragic happen or, you know, a really bad day at work. And sometimes you get into, you know, what people will call a bad mood, right?

But it becomes clinical when you can't seem to shake it. It's just day after day after day. And, you know, sometimes you can feel sad for a number of days, but then it kind of clears up and you get back on your feet again. Again, it's kind of arbitrary the length of time. It's give or take. And it's not like there's this clear mark where, okay, as soon as it's two weeks, it's definitely, you have a chemical imbalance.

But on average, it tends to be if it lasts that length of time, there's probably some sort of underlying, maybe neurochemical dysfunction or it's hormonal, but there's some sort of biological imbalance that nothing can get you out of it. And then you need a little bit more help.

And also it helps. when it's not coinciding with an event or like if you have a death of somebody close to you, you are in what we call a period of mourning that can actually last for a couple of years. But running parallel to that, you feel normal at times and then you slip into depression because of that event. So even if it lasted for two years, it's still natural because it's morning. But when nothing happens and you feel that way, there's something really wrong.

Thank you, Dr. Chuck Nice.

We call it the, there's actually a bereavement exclusion. So if there's been a death or maybe even just a significant, you know, a breakup, a divorce, then it's sort of allowed, you can have depressive symptoms for up to two months after say the death of a loved one. But then if it's, you can't sort of get out of it and it starts to, it's almost like thinking about it like long COVID, you know, you have these post COVID symptoms after a certain amount of time, you get diagnosed as long COVID and there's no real cutoff time. But so we have this exclusion criteria for bereavement. The problem is that That's.

A whole pass for bereavement.

That's what they're doing.

Yes, exactly. Exactly. But the problem is when people feel depressed and it's biological, but sometimes they try to tie it to events that are happening in their life. Oh, I'm only feeling this way because of X or Y. It must be because of this. And it becomes more clear to a person when things in their life are going well and they still feel depressed that, okay, maybe there's something in my neurochemistry that needs to be treated, maybe with medication.

Right.

But sometimes it's not clear because there's a correlation between negative things that are happening in your life. So that's what we're trying to differentiate as a clinician. Like, is it biological? What's their history? What's their genetic history, family history? Have they had this before in their life? Are you a parent?

Are you a parent? Yes.

So where do we go, doctor, with anxiety and depression?

Do they come as a partnership? Are they two separate things?

I have them so often together.

They they're really highly comorbid, meaning they tend to co-occur with one another, but not always. And they are two different things. So anxiety is more it's a different neural system. It's that kind of fight or flight response that we have. It's it's the anticipation of our future threat. It's imagining something bad is going to happen. And then you have these physiologic reaction to that imagined threat, even though there's nothing bad happening in the moment. So some people have chronic anxiety or specific phobias that they're anxious about specific things.

Whereas depression is different. It's more to do with this sadness, the lack of motivation. It's more the serotonin system seems to be involved, but it's not just serotonin. And we can get into that too.

It's this.

We will.

Yeah. But it's a different neurotransmitters are involved in depression, but there is some overlap. that they both involve things like serotonin and dopamine and norepinephrine. So there's some overlap between the two.

So Heather, I collect old science books and some of them are medical textbooks and medical, you know, what people thought was going on with human physiology in the day. And a common term back then was melancholy. Did that term like predate the word depression? Did it mean something else? Clearly it existed. as a condition long before our modern ailments started affecting us. So I'm just curious about the history here.

Yeah, it started, I mean, really, when you go far back, you know, we thought that, well, scientists thought that all of these psychological disorders had to do with an imbalance of certain fluids in our body. And so melancholia is, was actually too much black bile, which I think is like too much poo, basically.

Wow, so that's where the word comes from.

Wow, okay.

So that was the sort of, you know, the dark sadness. But wasn't there also.

Like, your uterus was, of course, making you depressed.

Hysteria was um they thought hysterical women was the uterus was detached and it was kind of floating around the body um and causing us to be hysterical that's it oh my god i'm pregnant in my throat.

Damn people were eating it yes which makes me wonder what are we going to think 200 years from now oh true.

But i mean this this exists you know for as long as humans existed we called in different things we thought there were different causes um but but There's this, what we have, we call now dysthymia or persistent depressive disorder is a little bit different than what what we'd call major depressive disorder dysthymia is having that low level like sadness it's not as intense as a depressive episode but it lasts longer so it could be like two years of just a kind of down mood um And so they're different gradations of what people used to categorize as different things in the past. Now we're trying to differentiate it and correlate it to underlying brain dysfunction.

So if you've got a persistent state of depression, you're most likely going to get prescribed antidepressants. Now, are they the cure or are they now seen as part of, what is it, a serotonin hypothesis and the sort of yes, no, maybe scenario that plays out there?

Yeah. What's a quick primer on the chemicals of happiness and sadness?

For many years, we had this kind of hypothesis. It's the monoamine neurotransmitters, which are serotonin, dopamine is related. The idea is that there was too little serotonin in the receptors, and this is what was causing depression. And so the treatments that developed over the last say, 50 years, were how do we increase serotonin in the receptors? And that's what's called SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, meaning you inhibit the neurons from sort of cleaning up the serotonin out of the synapses. So it stays there longer and it can activate the neurons for longer. And that is part of it. But what we've learned is that there are many other things that are contributing to depression. It's not

just serotonin.

But just so I understand what you're saying. So this medicine, it doesn't add more serotonin to your system. It prevents your system from getting rid of it.

Yes.

Or it prevents it from being... So the neurons will get activated and then they'll release serotonin into the synapse. And then it'll affect the neuron next to it as long as it's in that synapse, right?

So why is it better than just taking a serotonin pill?

Well, there.

Because that pill is called Molly.

There are actually other ways. So there are other ways to increase serotonin in between neurons. You want to have more serotonin. So there are ways that you can get to that. There used to be other drugs, older drugs called monoamine oxidase inhibitors or MOAs. But they weren't as effective as the SSRIs or just much more selective. And there are different receptor sites for the serotonin. So you can actually be selective in like those receptor site, you know, 1A and 1B. And so we're getting more and more honing in on exactly where we want to target. And there's different serotonin receptor sites in different parts of the brain.

So again, instead of like coding the whole brain with serotonin, you can be more targeted. with where you're trying to activate the serotonin. You can target it more toward the prefrontal cortex if there's more, let's say, serotonin receptor A1 in the prefrontal cortex. This is getting into the weeds, I'm sure, but it is.

Don't call my brain weeds.

Sorry. But it is more selective. That's why they're selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.

Have we gone down the route successfully of alternate... treatments outside of this is chemical we'll deal with it with another.

Chemical and you see these ads not i've read somewhere where a walk in nature has some chemical value to your brain through the woods.

Absolutely you can increase your you know your say your dopamine and your serotonin through just you know interacting in the world i mean that's a lot of what talk therapy is doing and just social being social, being around friends can make you feel good. Walking in nature changes your brain, right? When you change your environment and the stimulation.

So it doesn't have to be just with drugs, but when you have, let's say a genetic predisposition where you might produce less of this neurotransmitter, then that's where the kind of drugs come in that you need an extra little boost on top of these other strategies. But the other aspect is that Not everybody is, it doesn't work for everybody. So SSRIs are the first-line treatment. But sometimes you need, some people have SNRIs, which affects also the norepinephrine system. And even those don't work for some people.

And then we get into what we call treatment-resistant depression, and then we get into these alternative treatments that we have now.

Like what?

Exactly, yeah.

Shock therapy.

A good talking to. Which is what used to happen and now we hopefully have progressed.

Before we go into this subtopic, let me just say that if you're a person who is experiencing what Heather just talked about, the telltale sign is other people may not know you're depressed because you learn how to mimic what it is to be a happy, normal person. So if you find yourself kind of empty and feeling like, wow, all these people seem really happy and I'm just acting that way, you might be a good candidate to talk to a doctor about something that's good, baby. Something that can help you out is what I'm saying.

Dr. Shaking, a bottle of prescription pills that we cannot read because the resolution.

Of the screen is not high enough. She was talking about SSRIs. This is a dopamine reuptake inhibitor.

Nice.

Because I don't make enough dopamine. My brain does not make enough dopamine. As a result, without this, I found myself faking it through life for a very long time, dragging myself out of bed. everything was a problem. Everything seems so hard. And I just pushed through it because I grew up at a time where that's what you were supposed to do.

Suck it up. Yeah.

Suck it up. And so I got to a place where it was literally killing me. And, uh, I went and saw a professional and they were like, yeah, we, we, we can help you with that, man. We can just, and as a result, now when I feel happy and I'm in a like social setting, um, I'm not faking it anymore, you know? And some people were like, I wish you would go back to faking it because you're a little much. But you were.

Funny back then. Chuck, if I worry if you keep talking, Heather's going to have to charge us for a session.

Well, I was going to say he's a great example of, see, in that case, you know, it's affecting the dopaminergic system. It's not just about serotonin, right? Some people have too little dopamine or too little norepinephrine. There is the glutamatergic theory of depression now, which is really interesting and I think is really helping us make the most significant advance in treatment that's been for as long as I've been studying the brain, which is a couple of decades, is that glutamate is involved and that's an excitatory neurotransmitter. So let's say there's too little excitation and ketamine is this alternative treatment that is now FDA approved. You can do it intravenously, intranasally. You have to do it in the

office with the physician. And it seems to be really helping people where the SSRIs don't work and nothing else has worked. Ketamine is an alternative treatment. There's also ECT, which is electric shock therapy, which has some side effects.

I see why you abbreviate it.

You see teen today. One of the side effects includes having an afro where you didn't have one before.

The shoot. It can affect your memory, but it's not as dramatic as it's portrayed in light films. People aren't light convulsions and you're sort of sedated. But an alternative to that is transcranial magnetic stimulation. which is whereas ECT is more like you're turning a computer off and on if it doesn't work and just something happens, like you reboot the system and it works again. But transcranial magnetic stimulation is you have just a magnet and you're sort of stimulating certain parts of the brain very specifically. And you do that daily for a couple of weeks. And that seems to have a significant impact as well.

So Heather, when we talk about triggers, one of the more common ones we heard about is that as we, mentioned earlier, seasonal affected disorder, or SAD, where the sun stays low in the sky in the winter months. And if you go above the Arctic Circle, the sun doesn't rise at all. My wife grew up in Alaska, where the sun would rise at like 11 in the morning and set at 2 in the afternoon, something like that, or 1 and 2 in the afternoon. So she grew up in that and didn't know anything different than that.

It's just dark. It's not nighttime. It's just dark. And if that is your life, then how could it be a trigger for something if that's all you've known? And so therefore, is seasonal affective disorder something only for people who are totally into the summer months?

And then it.

Descends upon them as November, December arrived.

Yeah.

Like if his wife had moved there from Jamaica, I'm sure that would have really.

Messed her up.

Just like, go on now, man. Where is the sun? What did you do with the sun, man?

Um, Yeah, so with depression, it's called the stress diathesis model, meaning that certain people might be born with a kind of predisposition toward depression, but they might never develop it unless there's some sort of environmental stressor. So why is it that only certain people, it's similar to PTSD, like a lot of people can go to war and only a percentage of them develop PTSD and others have this sort of resilience. Why is it that when the winter months come, a certain percentage of people go on and get seasonal affective disorder and others are fine? And it might be that they have this genetic predisposition toward depression and the lack of light and the darkness is the trigger for it to sort of, you know, it has

this kind of cascade effect and then the symptoms come on.

I would have guessed naively that when you walk into your home, you turn on the lights. And all the lights are on anytime you are indoors. When there was a day where if you came in at night, you'd light a candle and work your way around the home or light the oil lamp. And so dark sunset was a major shift in your exposure to light. Not anymore.

I walked through Times Square. Midtown Manhattan. I don't even know if it's nighttime.

You can't even tell if it's nighttime.

You can't even tell.

But there's a certain type of light, right? So it's also, you know, we're also thinking about these hormones and as well as, you know, neurotransmitters, but like melatonin. So for example, when you're just looking at your computer light or a certain indoor lighting, blue light, that is different than natural light, which is more the yellow spectrum of light. And different kinds of light can affect your melatonin system in different ways.

So for treatment for seasonal affective disorder, there are special lights that are within the sort of spectrum of natural light that you sit in front of to actually, to help, help release the kind of neurotransmitters and the hormones that you want from natural light. But artificial light doesn't necessarily get you that, get you there because of the different wavelengths.

In principle, that's a knowable problem, right? I mean, I could create exactly the wavelength. Now with LEDs, I can create the wavelength of light that I want.

They do this on aircraft now, on long-haul flights.

Really?

Yeah, to change the lighting in the cabin. For the reason that Neil just said, because they now have LEDs in the aircraft.

Yeah, so it is a controllable problem. We can start to figure out what's the best setting and the timing and to help people that are prone to get this kind of you know, just depression during the winter months. But I also would suggest, and this is something that I'd actually want to look into, because I think it is interesting that if you grow up in one of these places like Alaska or, you know, Iceland or Norway, you know, you might just adapt to it over time, that your brain, you know, adapts and adjusts to it.

Whereas if you move there from somewhere else, it might really be a shock to your system and enough to trigger a depression. If you're, again, if you have that predisposition toward it.

And what about social cultural causes like poverty? In fact, let me say it both ways. I can imagine poverty where you don't know where your next meal is coming from that can bring a level of depression to you. But so too, if you're fabulously wealthy, there's an expectation of how every day would go. And if one little thing goes wrong, that really stands out as a force of sadness in your life. And.

Might that be an explanation for why suicide rates are not higher in those who suffer abject poverty than those who are fabulously wealthy? What is the latest numbers on the suicide rates? Do we know?

Well, this is the thing. This is what research has found, is that there tends to be this, as I said, this underlying biological predisposition. Let's say it's genetic, right? That regardless of whether you're in the worst poverty circumstances or in the best, you know, whatever, you're super fabulously wealthy, that it doesn't have that huge of an impact. So you, you know, people have done this research where they go to like India and people are, you know, living in dirt, poverty, dirt floors, whatever. And they're just happy and enjoying life.

And it's like, what, you know, what's going on here? And then you get some guy, you know, is everything in the world and is horribly miserable and, you know, commit suicide.

On his yacht.

Exactly. Like jumps off the yacht. And they also found that when something really good happens to someone, like they win the lottery, you get this little blip of like happiness and then they go back to whatever their baseline is. So if they're generally a miserable person, they'll end up going.

Right back to being miserable. Being a miserable person with money. With money.

Exactly. And then if you take somebody who has like resilience, they might get in a horrible car accident, become paralyzed. Right. They'll have a little blip of sadness and then they recover and go right back to being this wonderful, happy person. So it's like almost a little bit independent of environmental circumstances, whether you have this kind of resilience or not. But there is this also idea of inoculation. We need to have little disappointments to inoculate us against bigger ones that happen later in life. And you're not kind of building up that resilience in people and having what we would call an exposure therapy, meaning... you have to sit with something that makes you uncomfortable for a while. You can't

just avoid everything because then it becomes, you start ending up in these anxiety disorders, right? I can't be around anything that makes me feel uncomfortable and you can't tolerate any distress. So it's actually not healthy.

You quit everything that you do.

Yeah. Yeah. Because any kind, anytime there's a little bit of distress, it's like, okay, I'm not going to do this anymore. I can't, you know, it's, So, so that's kind of the thing with like, if you grow up with hardship, I mean, I'm not saying this is a great way to grow up, but, but there is this sense of building up a resilience that you're not this, you know, I guess they call like snowflakes and whatever, like being, you know, like any little thing will disturb you.

You kind of get this buildup toughness. That being said, however, there is when you have chronic stressors over periods of time, you know, you can, a low level stressor, which could be living in poverty, not knowing when your next meal is going to come. you know, it can lead to things like PTSD. It can lead to intergenerational trauma. And that's, you know, what I think is prevalent in a lot of these cultures where, like, if you think about Native American Indians living on reservations, they have a high rate of alcoholism. And, you know, we haven't really talked about all of the things that people do to try to self-medicate themselves, you know, when they're having these negative feelings that everyone can afford or has access to going to, like,

you know, the best psychiatrists and psychologists. A lot of people in rural areas So you get alcoholism and, you know, impulsive behaviors, you know, pathological gambling and shopping and drug addiction and all of that, that are often trying to treat these negative feelings that they're having.

People don't, they're not actively thinking that they're treating it. They just know they feel better for doing it. But in fact, in total, it doesn't.

Yeah.

It's a numbing. Yeah. It's a numbing of the feelings, but, And that's why a lot of people come to me and if they've never been on medication before, they're hesitant, right? They're kind of afraid and what is this going to do to me and whatnot. But the larger question is, what is it going to do to you if you don't get treated, right? What are you doing? What kind of self-soothing behaviors are you doing that are really detrimental?

And I don't think medication is for everyone. And I'm very conservative when I kind of would recommend to a patient when to see a psychiatrist for medication. But when it is needed, And when there is a neurochemical imbalance, it can really make a difference in a person's life, as Chuck may testify to.

Yes.

So in society, Doctor, just how much of this low-level depression, mind you, some of the things you've just described aren't quite low-level, but how much in society is undiagnosed?

You know, we don't really know, right? It's hard to say. There are cultural differences, but sometimes it's just, you know, not... it's not socially acceptable to have a mental health issue. Right. Like it's becoming more so, especially in the younger generation in the United States to like, it's acceptable to say I have depression.

I would still say there's a big stigma attached to it. You know, there's like, you know, even people who's talk about it freely, such as myself, you'd be surprised how many people, when you tell them that you suffer from this, you know, I have friends who are just like, not you or come on, man, you don't need that. Or, you know, they'll, They straight up just feel like this is not necessary. There are other ways that you can get your brain to do what you want it to do.

But doctors also, why are you using dandruff shampoo? You don't have dandruff. Right. There's that one too.

Right, right, right. And then the answer is, exactly.

Exactly.

There are people who, you know, exactly when you start taking medication and then they start feeling better and then they say, well, I don't, I don't really, do I really need this medication? And you get into this conundrum, right? And then I'll say, okay, well you can go through a trial period and get off it and see how you feel because it's like once you're on it and you're feeling better, you're saying, what do I really need to be on medication for? So sometimes patients cycle through this a couple of times where they go on and off the medication just to sort of prove to themselves that, that actually it is doing something and that they need it.

But the stigma really, it's so frustrating. I mean, I do think it is getting better compared to where it was in terms of the acceptance, but the brain is like any other organ, you know, it's like, it's okay to say, Oh, I'm taking this antibiotic because I have this, you know, infection.

Oh, that's what we're calling it now. Oh, thank God.

No, no. There's an actor that I, who I met who is, has depression and, but he, when he's about to go to make a film that you have to go through a medical examination, especially if the film is very expensive and because there's an investment being made in you and they had issues with his depressive, with his depression diagnosis. And he said, first time I heard it put this way, I'm just echoing what the two of you just said, but from a real life situation, he said, I medically treated for my depression. And so therefore I can work. You shouldn't think of that as different from anybody else being treated for any other ailment that might interfere with their work, provided the medicine brings you back

to where you need to be. And that it was so sensible and so clear that the brain is just another organ that's being treated.

Yeah.

And for some reason we think that it's like, it's like if someone had MS and they said, okay, sometimes I have flare ups, but you know, I have this medication that helps me with that. Right. They wouldn't be a liability. Right. And it's the same thing when you're being when you're you have a neurochemical imbalance and it's being treated. You know, I mean, there are some stipulations where they say, you know, for example, in child custody cases and things like that. Well, you know, it's predicated on the fact that they have to be on their medication.

They have to stay on their medication. Right. Because that is what's keeping them in balance. But this idea of like, oh, just suck it up, you know, like like that you can make just be happy. Right. Make your sadness go away.

It's like, don't worry.

Right.

A lot of people are out of depression.

The Bobby McFerrin treatment.

It's just chappy.

You don't think I'm trying?

So, Doctor, how do our hormonal differences affect the depressions within us?

Well, for example, estrogen or progesterone, which you see more in women, can actually affect our serotonin levels in the brain, which then go on to affect our emotions. And depending on the balance, whether it's too much or too little, it can make you more irritable or it can make you feel depressed or sad. And so there's this delicate balance between these hormones and their impact on the neurotransmitters, which then go on to affect us emotionally.

But if I, as a man, take those hormones, Will I start having those same effects or will it be fighting my testosterone to have the whole other effect?

Yeah, because you have, and women have testosterone too, right? And there's all these differences, right? You know, but testosterone can lead, tends to lead to more like aggressive behavior. But if we were to give you some progesterone or estrogen, it might just help like modulate the effects that the serotonin is having and just kind of make you less aggressive, but not necessarily make you feel depressed.

Instead of saying take a chill pill, we should be saying take some estrogen, man.

So what you really need is oxytocin. So oxytocin is the sort of love hormone. Oxytocin is also a hormone that acts as a neurotransmitter as well, but that's the sort of bonding love hormone.

The hugging.

If you hug, it gets, a colleague of mine, Paul Zak, did a lot of research on this. Hugging can release it, but it's released during breastfeeding, during sex, these times when you're really bonding. Um, so if we give everyone a little bit of oxytocin, we've had discussions in the psychiatry department about this, like we just put a little oxytocin in the water and maybe everyone would just like chill out.

Like war would end.

Yes.

Yes. That's the answer.

Is postnatal the same as postpartum depression? Is that the same thing?

Postpartum. Yeah. Postpartum depression. Yes. Yeah. Um, postpartum depression, there's menopause when there's lots of hormonal changes, um, And there's something called PMDD, which is premenstrual disorder, I believe, where you get severe changes in mood around your time of month when there's these hormonal changes. But it's so severe that you actually need medication for it. And people take SSRIs to treat this PMDD. And so just like if somebody says I have... a kidney stone or a kidney infection, whatever, like that's okay. But not to say my brain, you know, is out of balance. Somehow that doesn't seem real to people.

And that always really bothers me.

Can you think of any evolutionary value for postpartum depression? Children.

I think children are the evolution.

Well, there is a book.

It's like what, what.

Half I wrought. Exactly.

It's just like, that is, that is your body and the universe saying, don't do this again. Don't do this again.

Yeah. Let you go this one time.

Look, look, okay? Everybody gets one. Everybody gets one. Now, after that.

So there's a book. It's called Good Reasons for Bad Feelings by an evolutionary psychologist named Randy Nessie. And it really goes through all the different evolutionary reasons about why we have these emotions. One theory about depression is that it actually helps elicit help when you need it. So all the outward signs of depression, like, you know, you're, you're huddled up in a ball, you can't get out of bed, you're crying, whatever, that actually will elicit help in your community. So people will come to you, you know, okay, let me help you take care of like your child.

You're not in a good way.

Right.

And so that, that might've been one adaptive reason, evolutionary reason for depression. The, the, but, but not everybody shows those outward signs. Like Chuck was saying, I mean, there's just great commercial. I can't believe that they have these commercials on television, by the way, for, you know, psychiatric treatment.

Cause then you have patients coming to you like, Oh, I saw this commercial. Can I take this drug? But there's this one big commercial where they have these people holding up these happy masks, you know, and they're walking around with like a happy face on.

Yeah.

And then like really they're, they're underneath. And I find that actually comedian, all the comedians I've met and I've met quite a few, they all have come to me and said some level of like depression or anxiety.

They're all therapy. And they all have the happy masks. Right.

And it's like this really they're like, well, I never feel as good as I do when I'm on stage and when I'm making people laugh. And then it's almost like therapeutic in a way. So I think that's that. I don't know if there's been studies done, but but again, anecdotally, there's a higher prevalence of like depression and anxiety in comedians.

At least, I mean, again, this is my small sample size, but it's quite a few. So there's this idea of masking, but if you get away.

We have a sample size of one here and it's 100% of what's going on.

Right, this is exactly evidence.

Yeah, this is our experiment.

So doctor, go back to the woman who's crunched up in a ball and in suffering severely. And an elder woman comes along and says, it's okay, I'll take care of the.

Child for you right now. That's fine if you.

Live in a small tribe, a small village and everybody. Does this work in the 21st century when everyone is disconnected and there's concrete walls between everybody?

That's a really great question. So one of the concepts in evolutionary psychology is that all of these feelings evolved for a specific reason. But then they're butting up against modern society where it no longer is useful, right? So let's say it makes sense for us to be afraid of heights so you don't fall off a cliff, right?

And there's experiments where there are these babies and it's this cliff experiment where it's like there's actually a clear plexiglass, but it looks as if there's a big drop and the mom's on the other side of it. And she's going, come here, come here. And the baby will just like be frozen. Like you won't crawl across this clear plexiglass.

That's okay.

Up experiment yeah it really.

Is thank you that is actually like yeah do i have to be the one to say that i'm sorry i can't believe my mother's trying to kill me i cannot believe my mother is trying to kill me.

It's true it's pretty there are these videos the poor baby like doesn't know what to do it's like mom's come on come on it's just like frozen but it's it's instinctive right but now for someone to be afraid when they're just on the 33rd floor of a building Because that same old evolutionary program, which was adaptive, is no longer adaptive in modern society. And so a lot of disorders are sort of things that were normally adaptive that become either maladaptive because they're sort of so extreme or because there's a mismatch. It's this mismatch theory between what was useful before and no longer useful in modern society.

But the other thing is this. There's no line where suddenly something is clinical. It's just how much distress is it causing you? How much distress is it causing other people or your ability to function? Some people don't think that, like narcissists don't think they have a problem, but everybody else does, but they think they're just fine, right? So, but often it's subjective. How much distress is it causing you?

And then we sort of get to these clinical areas where a treatment is required.

Heather, I got time for like one more question. I want to sort of take the liberty of asking it. If someone comes into your practice, how do you decide if, well, they just need to come see me three hours a week for two years, or you just, and that'll change them chemically or emotionally or psychometrically, whatever, or you just give them a pill and say, you know, call.

Me back in a week.

The full name is that easy.

In other words, your profession, you come to psychiatry as a neuroscientist, and these are two different approaches to solving the problem. One of the persons laying down on the couch. The other one is they're taking medicine. Of course, you can do both. But I foresee a day, am I wrong here, where you don't have to keep shelling out cash to a psychiatrist or a therapist. Because we know exactly what the problem is, and this is the exact medical cocktail to fix it. And it's a one-stop shopping.

See, I disagree. That day is very, very unlikely because the human brain is so different from person to person. And the one thing that, in my experience, is you take a medication and your doctor tells you, listen, we're going to try this. They don't tell you, take this, and this is what's going to happen. They say, we're going to try this and keep an eye on it.

But Chuck, before Newton, people said, oh, these planets are all moving differently from each other. Well, this is very complicated. They all have their own movement. They're all doing their own thing. And Newton says, here's one equation. It's got it all. So what I'm asking is, Not is the brain complex, but are we just not there yet? And will neuroscientists come and save the day?

Okay. The brain is more than just the physical matter, right? It's the mind as well. So the brain is this really wonderful organ that it's a physical and it has neurochemicals and neurons, but it also has the subjectivity. So it's both. Now, research shows that medication alone can have a significant impact. Therapy alone can have a significant impact.

When you get them together and it's the right medication, because it is individualized, not one medication fits all. When you get the right drug with the right therapy, you get this synergistic effect that combined, it's much greater than the sum of its parts. They need to work in conjunction. If it was only enough to give a person a pill and say, be done with it, great. And I can just be out of business, at least in my clinical psych business and go straight back to neuroscience. But the issue is that not everything is just neurochemical. There's also the way your brain is kind of wired. And that's why it is actually unique because we all have different experiences throughout our lives and our brain gets wired up.

It gets sort of, it's like a piece of clay that gets molded throughout our lives and each brain is slightly different. So things that might trigger you don't trigger me and vice versa. And so it is complex. And it's more than just changing the underlying. So I'm giving you just one example. Like two people can have a lesion, like brain damage in the same part of the brain.

And one person has this severe neurocognitive deficit or some psychiatric illness due to it, and the other person doesn't. And that's because they're wired slightly differently or their neurochemistry is slightly different. So it's just not one size fits all.

You would have known that decades ago if you could just open up people's skulls just in a laboratory and just do that routinely. But you're stuck with the two people who happen to have the same accident and brain lesions. You have to wait for people with brain issues to come to you, right?

Yes. But now just as like go to the alternative treatments, when the SSRIs or other kinds of chemical treatments don't work, the ECT doesn't work, the TMS doesn't work, the ketamine doesn't work, right? What do you have left? There's what we call deep brain stimulation where we actually can implant electrodes in part of the brain called the anterior cingulate. Um, and, and Helen Mayberg, who's at Mount Sinai was one of the founders of doing this work, um, to treat depression where this, now you can actually implant electrode. It's being stimulated, connected to a battery pack and plants in your chest and you can control it. You can turn it up, you can turn it down and you can literally change

people's emotions in the operating room where you're like, they don't know whether it's turned on or off and suddenly you turn it on and they're like, Whoa, suddenly I feel great. I feel like I just won the lottery. And it's this level of control. And maybe that's, you know, where we're headed toward these neural implants.

And that comes from neuroscientists, not from psychiatrists.

And when they put this in you, when the operation is complete, do they go, it's alive.

It's alive. But there are.

Now, Heather, you're worrying me. I don't want to ever like. Take a nap while you're anywhere within a mile radius.

Wake up with a chip in your head and a bunch of magnets around you.

All right. We got to end it there. Heather, it's been a delight having you once again as our guest on this subject that I'm disappointed we haven't treated before. And perhaps we can pick it up again when you see new developments on the horizon. And we'll put it right on StarTalk Special Edition. Heather, where can we find you in social media? And weren't you doing some TV right now?

Yeah. Well, my Nova series is now out. You can find it online. It's called Your Brain on Nova. I'm on Instagram and Twitter at Heather underscore Berlin. There is a book in the works that's like to be continued. We'll have, you know, I'll talk more about it, but keep a lookout. And yeah, that's it for now.

And if I remember correctly, there's a movie called Heather's. The Heather's.

That had a significant impact on my life in high school. Although I have to say the name Heather does date me because it was like a very popular name in the late 80s.

Now it's the name of old ladies today.

Right.

Yeah. Now everyone knows like around the time I was born with this name. It's like what Mildred used to be, you know?

Right. Yeah. And Mabel. Yeah.

Right.

Hi, Gary. Good to see you, man. Likewise, my friend. Been good. All right. And Chuck, stay healthy.

Yeah.

Rattling your pills around in front of us.

This is why I'm healthy. I feel great, baby.

Stay healthy. Okay. All right. This has been StarTalk Special Edition. You're Ask Tyson. You're a personal astrophysicist. Keep looking up.

The Neuroscience of Depression with Neil deGrasse Tyson _ Heather Berlin

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