Depression can affect people of all ages and sex, but many people are not familiar with the symptoms associated with depression. More importantly, many people are not aware of all the treatment options available to address depression and what happens if it goes untreated.
It is helpful for persons suffering from depression to better understand the illness and the long-term impact depression has when not treated early. Depression is a complex and severe medical illness that causes persistent sadness, hopelessness, and distressing symptoms in the body.
These symptoms can negatively impair your ability to regulate your thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. Symptoms of depression can range from mild to severe and include insomnia, poor focus, tiredness, anger, poor cognition or problems remembering information, and thoughts of death or suicide.
But what causes depression? When a person is suffering from a depressive disorder, often, the signals that would typically regulate mood and emotions cannot effectively make their way back across the Salience Network. This communication problem can contribute to symptoms of depression.
For patients suffering from depression, it is vital to seek out treatment early to avoid the risks associated with not seeking treatment. What are the long-term social consequences of not seeking treatment? As humans, having social interaction is a vital part of our health and wellness.
While depression is often thought of as a mental illness, it also plays a heavy role in appetite and nutrition. Some people cope by overeating or bingeing. This can lead to weight gain and obesity-related illnesses, such as type 2 diabetes. You may even lose your appetite entirely, or fail to eat the right amount of nutritious food.
A sudden loss of interest in eating in older adults can lead to a condition called geriatric anorexia. Sweets and foods high in carbohydrates may provide immediate relief, but the effects are often temporary. According to a study , the most common vitamin and nutritional deficiencies are. Depression and stress are closely related. Stress hormones speed heart rate and make blood vessels tighten, putting your body in a prolonged state of emergency. Over time, this can lead to heart disease.
Recurrence of cardiovascular problems is linked more closely to depression than to other conditions like:. Untreated, depression raises the risk of dying after a heart attack. Heart disease is also a trigger for depression. The Cleveland Clinic estimates that about 15 percent of people with heart disease also develop major depression. Depression and stress may have a negative impact on the immune system, making you more vulnerable to infections and diseases.
One review looked at studies and found that there seemed to be a relationship between inflammation and depression, although the exact connection is unclear. Inflammation is linked to many illnesses, such as stress.
Some anti-inflammatory agents have shown to benefit some people with depression. If you think someone is considering suicide, get help from a crisis or suicide prevention hotline.
Try the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at As anxiety starts to overwhelm your life, you may start to experience symptoms that can include:. But without treatment, anxiety disorders can alter the way the brain functions and even change its physical appearance.
While the anxious brain cries wolf, the depressed brain experiences a kind of chemically-induced vertigo. Your brain has a team of three major neurotransmitters that help regulate your mood: dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine.
When these chemical messengers work together, they change your mood based on the situations and circumstances you experience.
Depression disrupts this process, upsetting the careful balance of all three chemical messengers. When depression starts to overwhelm the brain, neurotransmitters levels either increase excessively or decrease substantially. You can picture a sudden influx of neurotransmitters as frustrated chemical messengers storming through the brain. Whether depression causes your brain to produce too many or too few neurotransmitters, if left untreated, depression, like anxiety, can harm the brain.
Without treatment, depression and anxiety disorders can cause measurable changes in key areas of your brain. Brain imaging tests, such as MRIs, show that people living with depression and anxiety disorders have abnormalities in areas of the brain responsible for cognitive functions like problem-solving, memory, and planning and executing activities.
Untreated anxiety and depression can actually shrink regions of the brain, including:. Untreated depression can also inflame the brain. Not everyone who has depression experiences brain inflammation, but if you do, it can lead to severe symptoms like:. When your brain is in a constant state of stress or anxiety, the stems cells in your brain may begin to malfunction. If you've found no relief from antidepressants, or if your antidepressants have had unpleasant side effects, you may be wondering, what happens if I stop taking my antidepressants?
You may think it makes sense to stop taking something that just isn't working, but suddenly going off an antidepressant can have adverse outcomes. Put simply, antidepressants impact your brain chemistry. They work by changing the way certain brain chemicals, called neurotransmitters, affect your mood and emotion.
Eventually, messenger cells in your brain get accustomed to receiving increased levels of neurotransmitters. If you abruptly stop taking your antidepressants, you could experience serious symptoms of withdrawal—especially if you've taken the medication s for more than a month.
Some of the withdrawal symptoms include nausea, anxiety, restlessness, trouble sleeping, nightmares, sweating, and electric shock-like feelings in your head. Altogether, these symptoms are also known as antidepressant discontinuation syndrome. Antidepressant withdrawal symptoms typically occur within a few days of stopping antidepressant medication. Generally, they can last for up to six weeks.
In some cases, however, the withdrawal symptoms are more severe and can last for many months. Any reduction of your antidepressants will probably be gradual—over several weeks.
This way, your body can adapt better to the changes in your neurotransmitter levels. If you've tried multiple antidepressant medications and feel like they aren't working, there's a chance you might have treatment-resistant depression. You're not alone, though: about one-third of people with depression still have symptoms even after trying two medications. It's also possible that the antidepressant you're on works well but has intolerable side effects. The search for the right treatment can take some time, but there are other options out there that have worked for many people.
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