TORONTO – Anne Borelly remembers growing up with her mom who was struggling with depression.
“She’d be in bed a lot, she would sleep a lot. We had a piano and I always wanted to have piano lessons and because she was ill or in bed or she would have headaches, we weren’t allowed to make noise,” Borelly recalled.
Her mom in a vicious cycle of negative thinking she couldn’t break.
“I always marveled at her ability to sleep and I now know as an adult that it’s an escape … it’s to get away,” Borelly said.
She came to understand her mom’s pain all too well.
” I was very young and very quickly taking on responsibilities with my brother, my sister, um who were quite a great deal younger than I was … but I felt ashamed to say I needed help,” Borelly remembers. “And you turn that inwards.”
At 17, Borelly tried to kill herself for the first time. She was admitted to a psych ward for three weeks, but it was years – and further attempts – before she was diagnosed with bipolar disorders and episodes of hypermania.
Dr. Ian Gotlib, a Stanford University scientist, suggests it’s no coincidence Borelly and her mom suffered similar demons: Young children of parents fighting depression are at a greater risk of developing depression themselves, he said.
He’s trying to halt depression from progressing in youth. Gotlib presented his findings this week at a Toronto conference on memory hosted by Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute.
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“When we talk about depression here, we’re talking about full blown psychiatric diagnosis of a disorder that has a serious impairment. For these girls, if we’re going to say they are going to develop depression, it’s not simply just having a few days of feeling sad … it’s typically six months or more of feeling sad or irritable in a child,” he said.
He’s starting to study girls as young as 10 years old, but other researchers are looking at preschool-aged kids who may be depressed. Signs of depression can surface at as young as four years old.
Gotlib and his team believe there’s a series of risk factors for depression. For starters, they think depression can be learned from parents — through genetics and through learning from their parents’ behaviour.
“Some of those will be heritable or genetic, and we’re trying to understand what that package is so that we can intervene in a prevention approach,” he told Global News.
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He asks readers to imagine growing up with a parent who is depressed. To the mind of a young child, parents’ behaviour is all they know.
“Depressed individuals have poorer coping or emotional regulation styles, so they could model poorer forms of coping,” Gotlib says.
Kids who are depressed typically fall into the same criteria as adults: they’re sad, irritable, have a loss of interest in day-to-day activities, have trouble sleeping or loss of appetite, lack of concentration, and even suicidal thoughts. Like Borelly, they have feelings of worthlessness and low self-esteem.
“So positive and negative things happen to us all the time … when you’re depressed, you have a very difficult time not attending to those negative things. You can’t disengage from them, you tend to ruminate about them so your memories are all about negative material”
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Gotlieb is trying to break that behaviour. His work focuses on training young children to step away from negative thoughts and try to adapt.
He’s using neuro feedback training, which helps people change the patterns of brain activation in specific regions. When depressed people see negative stimuli, their brains light up in certain region. That doesn’t happen in other adults and young children.
For 15 minutes every day for two weeks, patients in his study sit in front of a computer and attention is drawn to positive images.
So far, it seems to be working: In lab testing, kids following this therapy have lower heart rates, secrete less cortisol, a stress hormone, and they’re less bothered by stressful situations.
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His next steps are to consider how long lasting this therapy is. Gotlib thinks booster sessions could come in later on in his research.
“All of this, in my mind, is better than staying on medication, for example, for the rest of your life,” he said.
carmen.chai@globalnews.ca
Follow @Carmen_Chai
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