Depression appears to alter how young adults remember childhood trauma and adversity. Dealing with these emotional health challenges may actually be the primary driver behind shifting memories, pointing to a need to treat current mood to help heal past wounds.
Depression appears to alter how young adults remember childhood trauma and adversity
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-Experiencing depressive symptoms can change how young adults remember the hardships of their youth, leading them to report more past traumas over time. Dealing with these emotional health challenges might actually be the primary driver behind shifting memories, pointing to a need to treat current mood to help heal past wounds. The research was published in Nature Mental Health.
Mental health professionals recognize that difficult events in childhood play a major role in later psychological struggles. Abuse, physical neglect, and family instability regularly precede mood disorders in adolescents and young adults. Traumatic situations can alter normal biological responses, keeping stress hormones like cortisol elevated and impairing the development of brain regions that handle emotional regulation. Over time, this biological wear and tear leaves a person highly susceptible to future stress.
Psychologists suspect that current moods might also influence how people look back on their lives. When a person feels low, they might be more likely to focus on negative events from their past. The theory of emotional regulation suggests that human feelings guide the way information is encoded and retrieved. Under the weight of a depressive episode, a negative bias can easily take root in the mind.
*Or* some individuals sought therapy for their depression and realized that those “funny stories” about their childhood are really just minimized and deflected trauma. There are a ton of people who thought what they endured growing up was normal and “no big deal,” because no one in their life called it out as the neglect or abuse it really was.
Maybe this is why I used drugs