How Mental Health Affects the Brain?



During the times of physical and mental stress, the adrenal glands produce excessive levels of cortisol, with some of it ending up in the brain.

Good mental health is an an essential part of our overall wellbeing, but not that many years ago mental health issues were thought of by many as something that was all in the mind. And while we know now that the mind is as important for health as the body, back then saying something was all in your mind was simply another way of saying you were probably imagining it.
Then for the discoveries scientists have made more recent years about the causes of mental health problems, including the biological processes in the brain that are affected when someone has a mental illness.


They are so many types of mental illnesses, which alerts a person’s feelings, thoughts and behaviours of a person.


·         Anxiety
·         Panic disorder
·         Eating disorders
·         Bipolar disorder
·         Seasonal affective disorder
·         Schizophrenia


The brain and mental illness:


What will happen in the brain when someone has a mental health? We are still having such a lot to learn about the relation between these two things, but nowadays it’s thought that mental health problems are linked with changes in neurotransmitters, which cause problems with the communications between neurons, as well as changes in the brain’s structure and function.
Take the depression, for instance a mental health issue that affects around one in 10 of us at some point during our lives .When someone is affected by depression, brain typically has high levels of chemicals called cortisol.
During the time of physical and mental stress, the adrenal glands produce excessive levels of cortisol, with some of it ending up in the brain. But when the brain is exposed to high levels of cortisol in the long term it can change your brain chemistry, which then triggers symptoms of depression.
However changes in neurotransmitters other than serotonin can also play a part in depression, and other antidepressant medications include serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors, which alter the amounts of serotonin and norepinephrine in the brain, and norepinephrine-dopamine reuptake inhibitors, which increase brain levels of norepinephrine and dopamine.

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