Depression and Learning

Gray Matters: The Latest From the Field of Neuroscience

For years I wondered why so many young adults who struggled in school were taking not just one prescription medication, but a cocktail that almost always included an antidepressant. Were these kids really depressed? What effect were these meds having on their brains? I have since learned that there is a complex connection between depression and learning. Depression, I learned, does terrible damage to the brain, impacting an individual’s memory and executive functioning. Depression can be both symptom and cause of poor school performance. Thankfully, there are many ways to reverse the damage done by depression, of which prescription medication is just one.

Depression releases glucocorticoids that kill brain cells in the hippocampus, an area essential to memory and learning; in some studies depression has been found to literally shrink the hippocampus as much as 15%. Left untreated, the damage may become permanent, but it can also be reversed through neurogenesis. Antidepressants actually increase the number of stem cells in the hippocampus (by a stunning 70% in one study of rats given Prozac). It takes roughly three weeks for most antidepressants to begin working, the same amount of time it takes a neuronal stem cell to wire into a network.

Depression also inhibits executive functioning, the same brain processes that are affected in ADHD and many other learning disorders. It does this in two ways, through shrinkage of the gray matter of the cortex that houses important processes like attention, emotion, memory and consciousness, and by causing an imbalance in the mood and attention neurotransmitters dopamine, seratonin and norepinephrine. This explains why so many prescriptions for stimulant medications like Adderal are partnered with an antidepressant like Zoloft. How can we know if a teenager’s lack of organization, problems with time management, and impulsivity are a result of a learning disorder or a symptom of depression? It would be extremely difficult, even if depression only caused school problems, and not vice versa.

Imagine if every day when you went to work, your boss told you that you were failing; then when you got home that night your family told you how disappointed and frustrated you made them, but you felt powerless to change anything about the situation. Pretty depressing, don’t you think? Difficulties at school understandably loom large in a child’s emotional landscape. If depression isn’t at the root of the school problems, it can quickly become a symptom. Either way, the damage done to the brain and its impact on learning is the same, and intervening in this cycle is imperative.

Depression is, quite literally, a breakdown of learning at the cellular level. The good news is that there are many proven therapies to reverse the damage it does to the brain, and antidepressants are just one of them. There is a growing body of scientific research showing that a number of other therapies are at least as effective as prescription medication, including Omega-3 supplements, light tray therapy, psychotherapy, and exercise. For more information, read The Instinct to Heal, featured this month in “On My Bookshelf.”