The Tiny Cell that Connects our Physical and Mental Health (March 2020)
The Tiny Cell solves a Decades-old Mystery of Why Toxic Stress Leads to Brain Changes that Spark Depression, Anxiety.
She writes, “… scientific dogma held that the brain was the only organ in the body not ruled by the immune system. The brain was considered to be "immune privileged."
“In the early 2010s, that began to change. As neuroscience and immunology started to merge, they began dismantling that century-old tenet. Scientists pivoted away from believing that the brain and body function as church and state entities, and began to embrace an entirely new brain-body paradigm that tells us that the brain is also governed by the immune system.
This ground-breaking science couldn’t come a moment too soon. As we look back over the past decade, one thing is disturbingly apparent: We are increasingly a people in despair. For many, when despair becomes depression, or untenable anxiety, the standard answers — antidepressants with a dose of therapy — are not enough to assuage suffering.”
If you are interested in this field you may also want to read, ‘The Inflamed Mind: A radical new approach to depression’, by Professor Edward Bullmore, Professor of psychiatry at Cambridge University and a world expert in neuroscience and mental health. In this book, Professor Bullmore reveals the breakthrough new science on the link between depression and inflammation of the body and brain. He explains how and why we now know that mental disorders can have their root cause in the immune system, and outlines a future revolution in which treatments could be specifically targeted to break the vicious cycles of stress, inflammation, and depression.