A fascinating new study in Scientific Reports shows just how revealing our eyes can be, and how a simple test might help doctors diagnose depression, in the future.
Read Felicity Nelson’s overview of the study at Science Alert, but here’s the gist.
You know that sense of total lethargy, apathy, lack of joy, lack of pleasure in anything, lack of everything that you feel when you’re depressed?
That’s known as anhedonia, and it’s the kind of depression that makes you lose all interest to do just about anything, because you literally have kind of lost all interest in anything.
It’s the “I can’t work up the energy to brush my teeth, even if they are about to fall out. Who cares if I don’t have teeth? I don’t like smiling in pictures anyway.”
I wrote about my experience with this type of depression awhile ago, and if you’re a regular reader, you probably have experienced it, as well.
To those who haven’t, I’m grateful you haven’t experienced it, but seriously, it’s real.
Anyway, there’s a reason for anhedonia, and studies suggest it could stem from a lack of activity in your brain’s ventral striatum, and that could be caused by any number of things we’re still learning about, including depression, Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia and other conditions of the brain.
One external, scientific clue about what might be happening (besides our obvious behavioral clues) comes when researchers dangle something normally appealing in front of our eyes.
So says the new study.
If we’re not depressed, the sight of something we love will dilate our pupils.
So, I love Paris. No matter the arrondissement, the time of year, the size of crowds, the anything, I will always love that city. Even if they take out the green chairs.
And when you show me even the most cliched trinket of Paris, my eyes will dilate.
Unless… I’m depressed.
That’s what the new study shows.
Depressed people show their depression in the way their eyes (do or don’t) respond to normally satisfying stimuli. And that’s because the reward circuit in the brain has been affected.
So for example, when presented with the prospect of winning money (universally liked, right), the study showed a remarkable difference in pupil dilation between depressed and non-depressed participants.
You can click on the study to see pictures for yourself, but it’s just remarkable.
Of course, simply confirming anhedonia doesn’t treat that symptom, but any new fragment of information regarding how our brains work in this disease is helpful for further research.
And if someone doubts your depression, just say, “OFFER ME SOME MONEY AND LOOK AT MY PUPILS.”
Except you won’t care if they doubt your depression, at that moment. Because you don’t care.
And if you feel like that right now… believe me, I’ve been there and often return to that dreadful land, and we really don’t know how we arrived there, do we? We just are there. No bags in hand, no clue of how we got there, and no thought that hope could even be found because that concept itself, “hope,” seems as distant in this grey as the joy we once experienced.
So if you feel like that…
For readers from the United States….
Find a psychiatrist here.
Find a therapist here.
For readers, internationally, please seek help from a local resource.
If you’re having thoughts of harming yourself or others, please call the National Suicide Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.
[Photo: Pexels, free photography].
