What can cause the mood disorders? Biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors can trigger the mood disorders.

Biological factors get involved from four perspectives; heredity, neurobiological abnormalities, neurotransmitter deregulation, and hormones. Mood disorders tend to run in families, and the greatest risk of inheriting and developing the disorder is having a biological parent who is suffering from the mood disorders. Bipolar disorder is more common to develop than the depressive disorder in families. Neurobiological abnormalities can also lead to mood disorders, and they are due to altered brain wave activity during sleep. Individuals with such altered wave activity experience less slow wave sleep, which is crucial to feel rested and refreshed, and thus they feel fatigue all the time and have sleeping problems. Depression is caused by the change in brain activity due to amygdala; amygdala helps as storage for the emotionally charged memories. Prefrontal cortex of the brain should signal amygdala to slow down in recalling those memories, but during depression, it failed to send clear signal to amygdala leading to continuous recalling of emotionally charged memories. According to Manji and Drevets, 2001, neuron deaths and disability can also trigger neurobiological abnormalities leading to mood disorders. Neurotransmitter deregulation can also cause mood disorder because imbalance in monoamine such as norephinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine can lead to both depression and mania depending on imbalance direction; too low or too much respectively. Lastly, hormones are also responsible; depressed individuals have persistent hyperactivity in endocrine system, which is impossible to return to normal functioning. Since endocrine system function does not return to normal, excess hormones produced by neuroendocrine glands in turn lead to neurotransmitter deregulation.

Psychological factors also get involved from three perspectives; psychodynamic explanation, behavioral explanations, and cognitive explanations. From psychodynamic view point, childhood experiences cause mood disorders. An individual may have childhood experiences preventing him/her from developing independence and positive sense of self, and grows up depending on others’ views; if the environment brings negative views on that individual, mood disorder is triggered. Additionally, depression can also be viewed as turning inward of aggressive instincts (Freud, 1917) because if an individual is suppressed from expressing feelings out loud in earlier ages, those feelings will get built up inside exploding internally. From behavioral view point, stresses experienced in life can reduce the positive reinforcers, leading to depression. To avoid stress, individuals may withdraw themselves from the stressful events, which further lead to more withdrawal and increase in reduction of positive reinforcers. When they are exposed to prolonged stress due to withdrawals, they face the state of apathy and unresponsiveness and feel hopeless and helpless (Seligman, 1975). From cognitive view point mood disorder evolved in an individual because the person keeps having negative views and rarely think positive, which leads to interpretation of own life as a horrible with negative expectations. Also as from behavioral view point, accumulation of negative views and stress can make a person become hopeless and helpless further causing higher level of depressions or mania or mood disorders.

Lastly, sociocultural factors get involved from four perspectives as well; interpersonal relationships, socioeconomic and ethic factors, cultural variations, and gender. Interpersonal relationships such as loss of a loved one, troublesome relationships with parents or friends while growing up, insecurities, lack of affection and love can give rise to negative thoughts to an individual triggering mood disorder. Socioeconomic and ethnic factors also play an important role, especially to immigrants and foreigners from developing countries dwelling in modernized countries; struggling to get out of poverty and having low socioeconomic status, lead to hopelessness, and alcoholism, causing mood disorders. In contrast to socioeconomic factors, depressive disorders are low in less industrialized countries and more in modernized countries. I know that also form my experience because in less industrialized countries, there are more family times because the standard of living is not that hard to reach, however in modernized countries, for some families it is hard to keep up to earn enough just to have food on table due to socioeconomic and ethnical factors. All of these can cause disorders in a long run.

What treatment can be used for the mood disorders? - Part III can be found here

By: Kaung | ChitChat247.com | KMKBlog.com

Tagged in: depressions | disorders | mood | mood disorders