Question: If a woman is experiencing depression, could this be caused by another medical problem?
Dr. Helen Mayberg: What people don't understand is that depression is a word used to describe a set of symptoms. In psychiatry, that's how we get information about what someone is experiencing; they tell us what their symptoms are. When the symptoms fall into certain categories, then we make diagnosis. But in fact, there are many medical conditions that can produce feelings of depression and actually produce all the signs and symptoms.
So it's very important that actually other causes of the symptoms are evaluated. Particularly when someone has a first presenting set of symptoms, that's the time it's very, very critical to make sure that there isn't something reversible going on, because in fact primary depression without other causes is a condition we're trying to research. We don't know what causes it. We know that life stress can precipitate a depression, but generally in people who are vulnerable. We know that people can have a depression out of nowhere, even though nothing in their life is particularly bad. We used to refer that as a -- depression, it's really a chemical depression.
All the terms are really bad because we really don't know what causes depression. That said, there are medical conditions where symptoms of depressions are prominent and finding those, just like someone can have memory problems, it might be Alzheimer's disease or might be that you are having memory problems because of an associated medical condition and if that medical condition is treated, the memory problems go away. Same thing with depressions where we wants to look for possible causes, medical causes, that if treated the depression symptoms go away and those kinds of conditions can be anemia, sort of low blood count, can be problems with the thyroid, it can be different hormonal imbalances.
So it's very important if one has symptoms of depression or if thinks one has symptoms of depression for the first time to actually be seen by a generalist so that other potential reversible causes can be identified.
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