Psychotherapy alters brain
chemistry
by Mary
Helen YarboroughPublic Relations
Psychiatrists know how effective psychotherapy is for treating people with emotional and mental disorders. And while public opinion views psychiatry as a “soft science,” the medical field is beginning to prove that psychotherapy actually changes brain chemistry in the process of helping a person heal.
World-renown psychiatrists pre-sented advances in psychotherapy to nearly 200 people who attended the 18th annual Update in Psychiatry symposium held June 2-3 at MUSC.
Dr. John Oldham“We are so much better informed about psychiatry because of huge advances in research. For example, we know now that psychiatric disorders are complex conditions that often have a physical component,” said John Oldham, M.D., chairman of MUSC’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. “There are genetic risk factors for many conditions, such as post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and stress produces neurobiological and neurochemical changes in those at risk.”
Adding a layer of hard science to predispositions to brain disorders is how inherited genes may make someone more prone to PTSD, schizophrenia and depression, for example, in similar ways that would lead to genetic risk factors to develop heart, lung or bone disorders.
For those reasons, it has been said that every person living today could be described as having pre-existing conditions, and it could make us all “uninsurable” if these pre-existing conditions are misunderstood.
“Physically, if a parent has hypertension, diabetes or cancer, [the children] have a certain amount of genetic risk. But if the child is lucky and is athletic and adheres to a healthy diet and lifestyle, he may dodge the bullet,” Oldham said. “It’s exactly the same in psychiatry. …We all have these pre-existing illnesses due to a certain genetic loading.”
Oldham explained how the brain is linked to all parts of the body. More science demonstrates that some psychiatric disorders also indicate a higher risk for physical illness.
“For example, we know that people suffering from depression have a higher risk of a heart attack,” Oldham said. He explained that the heart of a depressed person does not beat the same way a psychologically stable person’s does.
Modern psychiatry also has proven that neurons that die off or are destroyed can be replaced.
“It used to be that we believed the neurons you were born with would be all you would have for the rest of your life,” he said. “That’s not the case. We have learned that neurons can be regenerated, that people can grow new ones. …It’s all hard-wiring and genetics and biology, and how you’re built and how emotional disturbances contribute to psychiatric disorders.”
While medications are often used to “rebalance the body chemistry” to treat psychiatric disorders, "structured psychotherapy can actually help anatomically strengthen the brain at the cellular level,” Oldham said.
The conference also focused on how the brain and personality process long- term memory, and how exposure to negative events in childhood can affect the brain’s chemistry.
“If a person grows up in a troubled family with an unstable parent, and experiences a lot of hard knocks when young, a bad model was set and it is difficult to learn to trust other people in the world,” Oldham said, explaining the long-term effects on memory and experience. “The world is not the same for this person as it would be for someone raised in a secure, stable environment.”
Psychotherapy, using successful models, could be applied to “re-wire” the troubled person’s brain to accept the world as a good place, Oldham said. He admitted, however, that adjusting the brain chemistry or long-term behavior of an anti-social person is more difficult. “Anti-social behavior appears to be extremely hard-wired,” he said.
Part of the bigger agenda for psychiatry is to motivate changes in the United States so that all states allow treatment and insurance coverage for mentally ill persons the same as they do physically ill people.
“There is no parity in terms of coverage,” Oldham said. “There’s the fear of the stigma attached to mental illness that has imposed an inaccurate bias against psychotherapy. …[Meanwhile] one in five Americans has a major depressive disorder. …This leads to increased absenteeism, plus what’s called ‘presenteeism’ in that the person is there, but not functioning,” Oldham explained.
For more information about this conference, visit http://www.musc.edu/psychiatry/update.htm.
Friday, Aug. 18, 2006
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