FEELING a little down? Smile and put on a happy face.
A recent article in The New York Times, suggests that it is possible to treat depression by paralyzing key facial muscles with Botox, which prevents patients from frowning.
(You might think that patients would easily be able to tell whether they got the placebo or Botox. Actually, it wasn’t so obvious: Only about half of the subjects getting Botox guessed correctly. More important, knowing which treatment was received had no significant effect on treatment response.)
Other studies over the past several years have found similar effects of Botox on mood. Non-depressed patients receiving Botox injection above the eyes frowned less and felt better than those who did not receive this injection. Other studies have found that a Botox injection was superior to a placebo in a group of depressed patients.
The Botox studies, by contrast, suggest a circuit between the brain and the muscles of facial expression in which the brain monitors the emotional valence of the face and responds by generating the appropriate feeling. (Obviously, information flows in both directions, as you can think yourself into practically any emotional state and then have the face to match it.)
There are other treatments for depression that appear to use facial feedback in a similar way. Light therapy stimulates the retina and excites the optic nerve, which sends signals directly to the brain and effectively treats seasonal depression. And direct electrical stimulation of the brain’s vagal nerve has antidepressant effects.
Botox for depression is part of a long tradition of “outside-in” somatic therapies — many of dubious efficacy — that manipulate the body with the aim of altering the brain and mind, for instance by using cold wet sheet packs to treat severe agitation or acupuncture for anxiety.
In a broad sense, these Botox studies underscore one of the biggest challenges in treating people with depression. They might think that the reason they are depressed is that they have little interest in the world or their friends — a mistaken notion that is the result, not the cause, of their depression. They insist that only once they feel better will it make sense for them to rejoin the world, socialize and start smiling. Their therapists would be well advised to challenge their inverted sense of causality and insist that they will start feeling better after they re-engage with the world.
Whether Botox will prove to be an effective and useful antidepressant is as yet unclear. If it does prove effective, however, it will raise the intriguing epidemiological question of whether in administering Botox to vast numbers of people for cosmetic reasons, we might have serendipitously treated or prevented depression in a large number of them.
This Information is Brought to you courtesy of Dr. Mark Bishara and The Paragon Plastic Surgery and Med Spa in Mansfield and Southlake.
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