The Inflamed Mind Quotes

“we are beginning to understand that the immune system could also be able to remember childhood episodes of assault or famine or any other severe threat to the self’s early survival. Child abuse survivors may enter adult life with their immune system set on a hair-trigger, poised to react to minor infections and social setbacks with a disproportionate inflammatory response that causes depressive symptoms.”
― Edward Bullmore, The Inflamed Mind: A radical new approach to depression

“Despite increasing access to psychotherapy, despite increasing numbers of prescriptions for SSRIs at decreasing cost per pill, depression is still expected to be the single biggest cause of disability in the world by 2030. It is not cancer, or heart disease, or rheumatoid arthritis, or TB, or any other physical disease, that accounts for economic costs in the order of 3% of GDP in rich countries. It is mental health disorders, principally depression.”
― Edward Bullmore, The Inflamed Mind: A radical new approach to depression

“In the 30 years following Prozac, the field has not flourished but fizzled out. There have been no major new advances in drug treatment, or psychological treatment come to that, for depression or any other mental health disorder, since about 1990.”
― Edward Bullmore, The Inflamed Mind: A radical new approach to depression

“My mental state was a reflection or meditation on my physical state, rather than directly caused by my physical state.”
― Edward Bullmore, The Inflamed Mind

“Every macrophage in your body has been highly trained by evolution, equipped with LPS barcode readers and other devices, to enable an innate immune response. That deep ancestral knowledge – expressed in the genetics and molecular machinery of the macrophage – is what protects us, makes us less naïve than we might have thought,”
― Edward Bullmore, The Inflamed Mind: A Radical New Approach to Depression

“The enemy identification and elimination process happens very fast: it is an algorithmic response to automatic pattern recognition – shoot on sight.”
― Edward Bullmore, The Inflamed Mind: A Radical New Approach to Depression

“We now know that inflammatory proteins in the blood, called cytokines, can send signals across the BBB, from the body to the brain and the mind. I will say more about cytokines later but if you’ve never heard of them before you can think of them as hormones which circulate in the bloodstream creating powerful inflammatory effects throughout the body, including the brain. So when the dentist started probing my gums and scraping my teeth, she would have caused immune cells in my mouth to produce cytokines, which then circulated throughout my body in my blood and communicated inflammatory signals across the supposedly impermeable BBB to reach the nerve cells in my brain and cause my mind to become inflamed. What”
― Edward Bullmore, The Inflamed Mind: A Radical New Approach to Depression

“the average life expectancy of patients with serious mental illness is at least 10 years less than expected.”
― Edward Bullmore, The Inflamed Mind: A radical new approach to depression

“know that depression is heritable – it runs in families – so your risk of being depressed is increased approximately three-fold if both your parents are depressed and increased approximately two-fold if one or more of your siblings is depressed”
― Edward Bullmore, The Inflamed Mind: A radical new approach to depression

“Could the common feeling that “we don’t know what to say” to our depressed friend conceal an ancient inherited instinct to recoil from close contact with people who are behaving as if they are inflamed and potentially infectious?”
― Edward Bullmore, The Inflamed Mind: A radical new approach to depression

“Biomarkers of inflammation, like cytokines and CRP, are increased in many stressful situations, including poverty, debt and social isolation. Carers of patients with Alzheimer’s disease, people with day-to-day responsibility for a spouse or relative with dementia, have increased inflammatory biomarkers.74 So do adults who suffered poverty, neglect or maltreatment as children.”
― Edward Bullmore, The Inflamed Mind: A radical new approach to depression

“about 80% of all episodes of depression have been preceded by a stressful life event.67 The most depressing stresses are events that involve both loss of an important relationship and social rejection.”
― Edward Bullmore, The Inflamed Mind: A radical new approach to depression

“Body fat, or adipose tissue, is inflammatory. About 60% of the cells in adipose tissue are macrophages, the robocops of the immune system, and one of the principal sources of inflammatory cytokines. Overweight or obese people, with a higher body mass index, will generally have higher blood levels of cytokines and CRP than slimmer people.62 We also know that overweight people are more likely to be depressed.”
― Edward Bullmore, The Inflamed Mind: A radical new approach to depression

“We can move on from the old polarised view of depression as all in the mind or all in the brain to see it as rooted also in the body; to see depression instead as a response of the whole organism or human self to the challenges of survival in a hostile world.”
― Edward Bullmore, The Inflamed Mind: A radical new approach to depression

“There are fascinating new insights into how high levels of social stress can increase bodily inflammation. And there is growing evidence that people who have experienced adversity or abuse in childhood are more likely to be inflamed as children and adults.13,”
― Edward Bullmore, The Inflamed Mind: A radical new approach to depression

“And recent fMRI research has begun to produce evidence that inflammation of the body can have a direct causal effect on the human brain and mood.”
― Edward Bullmore, The Inflamed Mind: A radical new approach to depression

“We know that when nerve cells are inflamed the connections or synapses between them are less capable of learning patterns of information and that inflammation reduces the supply of serotonin as a transmitter between nerve cells.”
― Edward Bullmore, The Inflamed Mind: A radical new approach to depression

“overwhelming evidence for a strong association between inflammation and depression.”
― Edward Bullmore, The Inflamed Mind: A radical new approach to depression

“We now know that inflammatory proteins in the blood, called cytokines, can send signals across the BBB, from the body to the brain and the mind.”
― Edward Bullmore, The Inflamed Mind: A radical new approach to depression

“The 17th-century philosophy of Cartesian dualism is the foundational bedrock of Western scientific medicine. And the disembodiment of the brain by the rigid interdiction of the BBB was a concrete realisation of this philosophy.”
― Edward Bullmore, The Inflamed Mind: A radical new approach to depression

“Neuro-immunology investigates how the immune system interacts with the brain or nervous system; whereas immuno-psychiatry is more focused on how the immune system interacts with the mind and mental health.”
― Edward Bullmore, The Inflamed Mind: A radical new approach to depression