Can depression lower the IQ??

Im a student at McMasetr university and due to depression i have been out of school for a while .So im just wondering if this condition has the potential to decrease my memorizing ability.

thank you

Depression only exists because you want it to exist

no i think it more that you cant motivate yourself to do the work
I have the same problem when im depressed.
Your iq doesnt change mine remains the same at a massive 134
depressed or not depressed :slight_smile:

mike, just write on this board 700 times in two months and youll start to feel pressure on your ears and the back of your eyes because your brain will bulge out and totally work faster and better. i think the brain is very much like a muscle, exercise it and it works better.

i actually think instead of damaging and repairing, exercising the brain is like travelling down a rough road over and over. it gets worn down and slick so you can eventually make quicker easier connections when youve eroded away all the bumps in the road. especially with conversation/writing abilities, since all they are is the ability to recall the correct word. the more often you recall a thing, the more quickly you an later.

all i know is that my brain works seriously like ten times better than it did when it atrophied over the summer. and in the summer i had class, and now i have a mind numbingly boring job that this site helped me transform into 6 hours a day of philosophy time. maybe its the daily coffee, maybe its writing, but without a doubt, my brain performance and conversation abilities have surprised even me, which is real hard to do.

Hi michael angelo,

Sorry about your depression.
I am brand new here…so you may not have heard this ever expressed in this way, so please bear with me.

I love myself as depressed
so that I can love you as depressed as myself,
and so help you to lvoe yourslef as depressed
so that you can love me as depressed as yourself.

This Love of myself means that the first depression I ever suffer from is hatred of myself as depressed.

Hatred of myself as depressed means that
I will hate me when depressed,
and so hate you as myself when you are depressed,
and think that I never have any reason to be depressed,
and so be doubly depressed when i am depressed: depressed by whatever and with my Love depressed or with my hatred pressing down on me,… I am depressed by depression,
and means that I am still half-depressed even when not depressed,
and so will never find a reason for my depression.

Hatred for myself as depressed separates me, dis-associates me, disconnects me from Love of of myself as undepressed, makes me not want to remember myslef as depressed, makes me wnat to forget myself as depressed.

So, [I am sure you can guess what I am going to say about depreesion and memory!],
depression of itself does NOT affect your memory.
ONLY hatred of yourself as depressed and as any other words affects your memory!

When I love myself as the words depressed and as undepressed, as remembering and as forgetful, as etc and as non-etc,
then even when depressed, my Love is still lifting me up high,
and when undepressed, i am doubly high and lifted up,
and all of who I am is associated in one Love, stored in one filing-system,
and so then I automatically do want to remember all of who I am,
and so do remember all of myself and so my memory works perfectly well.

Love is the spirit of association and as you know memory works by association.
So Love is what makes memory work!
So Love yourslef as depressed, and go on to love you as all the other words you now hate you as, and not only will your memory be perfect, but you will be able to handle being depressed with Love, since even when you are depressed, you will be loving you as depressed, and that Love will be high and so lift you up so that your depression is kept normal, and in Love u will realsie that there is some good reason why you are getting depressed, which will tend to lift the depression.
guaranteed.

By the way, at xmas time, I used to suffer from more depression simply becasue I hated myself myself as all these words: as low and as lonely and as alone and as single, and as undated, as rejected, as unremembered, as forgotten, and as etc.

all love and respect,
iloveu

Perhaps some things cannot really lower your IQ, just make you slowly loose the arts of forming your IQ into all it’s capabilities, but at the same time, you will always have the IQ that was at your highest point during any point of your life.

Glucocorticoids (stress hormones) like cortisol can damage your hippocampus. Stress can also cause you to make more illogical decisions.

hey michalangalo…long story short your mind compleatly controls your mental reality…if you tell youreslf your depressed and you truely believe it you will be…if you tell yourself your cured and you believe it you WILL BE!..seriously.!..the hard part is making yourslf truely believe it. …try smoking some pot, once ripped come up with some plan to cure yourself…(wheter your plan is legit or not, doesnt matter)…if you can believe it it will be true. goodluck.

Without emotion, man would be nothing
but a biological computer. Love, joy,
sorrow, fear, apprehension, anger,
satisfaction, and discontent provide
the meaning of human existence.
Arnold M. Ludwig—1980

Theoretical Artificial Intelligence. Your persona/personality just grabs ideas, and thinking of other people. Like a computer with artificial intelligence.

i agree with cogito… when you’re depressed you can’t really motivate yourself to do much of anything except put a cd in your stereo or something. i ended up not getting about 5 or 6 assignments in a row in every class not turned in last year cause i was depressed for a couple weeks and didn’t do ANY homework.

I am also struggling with a depression/depersonalization. Anyway, I’ve had periods of hypomania, which obviously made me feel incredibly smart and so on. There’s strong evidence, incidentally, that links mild manic states to hightened creativity, and even higher intelligence. The creativity aspect is accepted without doubt. To find more information on the links between mania and creativity/intelligence, refer to the book Touched with Fire, by Kay Redfield Jamison. She lays out a pretty strong argument for these correlations.

Thus, deducing from that, we find that depression does indeed lower iq scores.

I am also struggling with a depression/depersonalization. Anyway, I’ve had periods of hypomania, which obviously made me feel incredibly smart and so on. There’s strong evidence, incidentally, that links mild manic states to hightened creativity, and even higher intelligence. The creativity aspect is accepted without doubt. To find more information on the links between mania and creativity/intelligence, refer to the book Touched with Fire, by Kay Redfield Jamison. She lays out a pretty strong argument for these correlations.

Thus, deducing from that, we find that depression does indeed lower iq scores.

Have you considered medication for your depression? It is a serious illness, and if it impedes your ability to function, it requires treatment by a professional. Any kind of untreated mental illness will have an adverse effect on a person’s ability to concentrate. Severe depression is like being immobilized; a person who suffers from this illness loses their motivation to engage in many previously enjoyed activities. It can reach the stage where showering or eating properly seems like too much of an effort.

As a student, your primary tool is your mind. If you were a construction worker with a broken arm, you would seek a doctor’s help in healing your arm so that you may continue with your work. You need to do the same thing, seek a doctor’s help with your mental illness and get your butt back in school.

I’m sure it would have a lot to do with MOTIVATION.

We learn well when motivated. It comes out of our curiosity and interest. Without it, it reminds of lecture where my interest is practically null, and the subject boring. As much as I may force myself to listen, my body says SLEEP SLEEP SLEEP.

Yes, stretching the mind and learning, filling the mind with ideas continually must HELP, agreed. To do it without driving yourself kooky, you must have been motivated or it doesn’t happen. Sleeping is always an easy way out, and relaxing as well.

I bet there’s studies proving that a person’s deposition affects not only how they view the world but also what they may learn about it. If you remember anything, it’s an image, created by the mind. A stimulated mind I would think creates these more readily and coherently for later recall.

And NO, silly poster, who said we just can think away feelings or ailments. Sorry that’s not the real world. Our brain does affect us according to it’s chemical make up. To think a depressed person asks to feel dreadful and wills it upon their self is just silly, and non-sensical. Next you say those suffering from siezures bring that on themselves as well. This part of the stigma that still gets attached to those who suffer mental ailments, and it just dismisses the physics of our brain as if we could also construct another if we would just think harder than that mustard seed. Wishful thinking???

Careful what you wish for!

the names galactic. and yes you can think your way out of depression, and i can prove this without blasting you with meta-physics. FACT: people with o.c.d. have depression. Fact: cognitive therepy (talk therepy that changes your thinking) is equally as effective as medical treatment (drugs). the problem is americans are taught to go for the easy route, abd pills are far more excepted then seing a shrink. i never said a depressed person wills depression on themselves. but they can get out of it by thinking differently then the way there brain has been molded. whether they do this themselves or if they get help from a therepist, its a FACT that thinking differently can change the chemicals in your brain thus reliving or minimizing depression. if your tell yourself this impossible, it will be. ding.

p.s. the" real world"your living in might not be as real as you think. carefull what you dont wish for!!!

what does memorizing ability has to do with IQ and your question with the name of the thread???

Therapy alone can be effective in treating certain types of mental illness, and yes, for treating OCD it can be as effective as drug therapy. Severe depression is another type of mental illness,however, and does not repond well to CT. A quote for a study done by NIMH:
[b]
Psychotherapy or Pharmacotherapy?

In 1989, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) completed the most careful study ever done comparing the success rates of psychotherapy vs. antidepressant drug therapy in the treatment of major depression.

Patients with major depression were assigned at random for 16 weeks to one of four treatments: an antidepressant drug (imipramine), a placebo pill (monitored by brief, supportive, weekly visits to a physician), interpersonal therapy, or cognitive behavioral therapy.

The interpersonal therapy focused on the immediate social context of the depression and the depressed person’s relations with other people. The cognitive therapy focused on correcting the patient’s negative thinking, irrational guilt and pessimism.

Most patients in all four groups improved during treatment. The major findings were surprising:

* For the Less Severely Depressed Patients: (about 60% of the total) all four treatments were equally effective.

       Placebo therapy (weekly visits to a supportive physician to receive an inactive pill) was just as effective as weekly visits to a psychologist or psychiatrist for psychotherapy.

       Placebo therapy was just as effective as antidepressant drug therapy.

* For the Severely Depressed Patients: (about 40% of the total) the antidepressant drug therapy was highly effective; for example, 76% improved on imipramine and only 18% on the placebo.

       Interpersonal therapy was moderately effective, but not as effective as antidepressant drug therapy.

             For example, long-term interpersonal therapy (once a month) was directly compared with imipramine for ability to prevent recurrence of major depression among severely depressed patients who recovered. The average time until a recurrence was two-and-a-half years for patients taking the antidepressant drug, a year-and-a-half for patients in psychotherapy, and ten months for those who had neither.

             The interpersonal therapy provided no further help for patients who were already taking the antidepressant drug.


Cognitive therapy, for these severely depressed patients, was ineffective (being no better than placebo).
[/b]

Other types of mental illness, such as schizophrenia, absolutely require medication. I don’t know if you have ever known a person suffering from this illness, but I do. For this member of my family(who suffers this disease due to a brain injury incurred in a traffic accident), talk therapy of any kind is completely ineffective. If it were not for his medication, he would not be able to function at all. Any person who has ever tried to “talk” someone out of a schizophrenic episode knows exactly what I’m talking about…it is like banging your head against a wall. How do you “reason” someone out of believing that the devil is controlling their thoughts? Trust me, you cannot, and I have tried many,many times.

I agree that medication can be overutilized in the treatment of mental disease, but there are cirumstances when it is essential. In the case of severe depression bordering on suicide, prescribing talk therapy alone is negligent and wholly ineffective.

It depends on the individual mental illness; what may have worked for you will not neccesarily work for someone else.

And by the way, not everyone with OCD suffers from depression, I don’t know where you got that “fact” from.

I agree with Shy on so many points and even levels.