Your Internal Organs and their role in Depression

Your Internal Organs and their role in Depression – A holistic consideration

There is no real way to tie down depression to one singular element.  At one time or another most of us are going to find ourselves depressed about something.

Holistically thinking … depression is a mind/body relationship.  For example, if a persona has SAD or Seasonal Affective Disorder during the winter, it is quite likely that they have some kind of kidney deficiency.  If a person is always looking regretfully back at a “lost past”, grieving over the change, this has a lot to do with the lungs.  If a person is just over concerned about everything and taking too much on, then this would be a Stomach or Spleen stress.  If a person has to take charge of every situation and has an almost angry compulsion to get a lot of things done, then this person is largely controlled by the liver.  Of course the heart has a lot to do with all our joys and sorrows in general and has a lot to do with conditions becoming manic.

Few people are strictly one type or another, and the explanations are not ever as cut and dried as the above, but the main point to be stressed here is that this emotional tendency is echoed in your physical body.  Anger, fear, worry, grief, etc, are emotions, they are related to certain organs in our body and are therefore manifested physically.

The term depression, being a “down state” in medical literature, for example, Bipolar or Manic Depression would be a type of depression that is “down” and then suddenly completely “up” and possibly violent.  Being in some state of funk when life is going badly is fairly normal for any one of us.  What most people think, is the dysfunction of this fairly persistent down state regardless of the rest of your life possibly being pretty good.

When little children moan and cry and throw fits we look immediately at factors such as diet:  “have they eaten?” or “The chocolate he ate at lunch did this?” and we always assume that they are tired or need a nap.  When we get older, these physiological factors get more complex, but the resultant emotional changes can be similar.

The Kidneys and Liver

One of the most common types of depression involves the Liver and Kidneys.  In the circulation of energy, the Liver gets its energy from the kidneys.  While mentioned before that the kidneys can become taxed in the winter, the liver can be taxed by the spring.  A very tough emotional time through these seasons, plus maybe factors like poor diet or overwork can contribute to these deficiencies as well.

The sufficiency of both of these energies has a lot to do with our will.  When these energies are strong, we can assume responsibility for lots of difficult tasks and get them done.  But when they are deficient, for whatever purpose, emotional or physical, we can lose that will.

Many depressions begin with a post partum mother who has not recovered from a difficult birth, but is also not able to meet her own high expectations of accomplishment in the family, home or workplace.  In any case this is the person that is suddenly rendered incapable of doing what their mind tells them they must and can be made miserable to the vision of a former self that has now become lost.

Kidney deficient types get low and depressed in the winter as the winter taxes the kidneys generally.  The mark of a kidney deficient person is that they are subject to fears.  They can be shocked easily and in a low grade constant sort of way fears can overwhelm them and make them closed in by a world that is always asking them to try new things.  This is overwhelming to their lack of sense of adventure.  This person can be often caught irrationally using the word can’t to the frustrations of others who try to get them to do something challenging or unfamiliar.  This leads to a closed in sense of retreat from life that can be depressing and make a person feel trapped.

Spleen and Stomach

A spleen or stomach type will typically take on a lot. They think about everything and everyone and a lot of this is involved with worry.  When things start to get to be too much, they become defeated and overwhelmed.  In this regard they are physically sick and part of their downhill slide involves the physical stress of the digestive system.  Many of these types of people can also fall into anxiety or panic attacks as once a thought gets going it becomes hard to stop and overwhelms them as it clouds their minds and perceptions.

Lung

The lung type is regretful and somewhat grieved by loss.  They are always depressed by the loss of how things “used to be.”  The death of someone close to them can throw them into such a feeling of grief that they almost can’t breathe, and in fact often can wane away and die this way when a close partner has passed away.  This unsuitability of the world can make the person feel unfit for the world they have to cope with.

Heart

One of the things they are studying most is the effect on the heart.  Most of the study has been on the effect of heart attacks and the type A persona who suffers from a rather constant time-compressed stress.  What they are finding in a lot of emotionally hostile individuals is that there is a high level of glucocorticoids in the blood stream that stimulate cortisol production and lead towards heart attacks. The fact that they find high glucocorticoid levels in depressives as well and in both of these cases, it is more the way one responds to stressors that are related to be the cause.  The real is that there is a direct physiological link to emotional turmoil that, at last, western science finds measurable and therefore scientific, more directly linking the mind and emotions to negative physiological phenomenon..

To each individual type of person, the type of stressor one responds to depends on the type of person you are and whether you are healthy or not.  The person who is balanced and healthy, the possibility that you are going to fall into a depression is less likely than if you are not, regardless of the outward stimulus.

This is what I like with the Biofeedback device… we can balance and address both the emotional and physical parts of the bigger picture.  Depression is a complicated matter.  We can’t over simplicate the connection between the mind and the body.  However, one of the most difficult problems is that the depressive person must see the depression as their problem.  They must make certain that it is their own, want to change for themselves, not just for others.  Many people ask for help with someone elses depression for which we are all helpless to do without the absolute permission of the person who is depressed.  The problem is both physical and emotional.  It is a journey that is hard, painful and requires a lot of patience and willingness for new levels of self discovery.