ELI5: What causes our minds to become tongue tied when we become depressed, even when we clearly want to talk to the people around us but just can’t?
ELI5: What causes our minds to become tongue tied when we become depressed, even when we clearly want to talk to the people around us but just can’t?
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It’s multifactorial. Depression is not completely understood for individual people, we just know what the main factors are in general.
You have the physical side (see the monoamine theory for more depth) – basically the neurotransmitters in your brain are at the “wrong” levels which affects how signals are transmitted through the brain. This can affect functions in all sorts of manners. Throw in the side effects of depression and how they make your body work (for example, sleep deprivation, starvation, loss of day/night cycles and schedules) and these physiologically start to reduce your function from a variety of approaches.
There’s the psychological side (see traumatic responses and coping mechanisms) – how you think, how you feel, how you perceive yourself and others, and how you respond personally to stress. Are you normally articulate, do you stutter, do you have trouble forming words – and then throw in how you psychologically act and react to depression, and it can become a mess very quickly there as well.
Sociological factors play a part to – how you were born, raised, your cultural/spiritual beliefs and how they impact your sense of self and communication skills. How do people react to bad news, to depression, to depressed people – is there healthy care and concepts in society around mental ill health, or stigma and a need to ignore or supress such things? Do you have good friends and family you can open up to, or always been a bit private or reclusive? How has this changed as a result of your depression?
There’s a lot of stuff that influences the basic ability to just think and talk in a healthy individual, much less when we throw depression in the mix. The things I’ve mentioned above are barely even scraping the surface of what is affecting someone’s communication skills when depression hits. But even from these few factors alone, hopefully you can start to understand that the question “why is it difficult to communicate in depression” is a vast, difficult, individualised one.
If it helps as am example – for me, I have a small circle of close friends and a demonstratable biological imbalance in neurotransmitters, and was raised to be independent and work on a system of “no news is good news.” I came home a week ago to find my flat half-emptied and a letter of intent for divorce. In the first twenty-four hours I told more people at work what has happened than I have my friends and family because the practicality of the situation is that I need some buffer time at work, and I have few close friends to talk to anyway. However I was also taught to be open and honest, so those who I have spoken to have had the full download instantly – because counselling and therapy affirmed for me people do listen and will do maximal care for me. But I only have the mental room to think about all that because I take an antidepressant anyway.