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-My individual source was my sister Gracey Hayes. She suffers from anxiety and That is what I wrote my paper on. How medications and talk therapy effect depression and anxiety.

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-This is my Essay 4. I wrote it on medication and talk therapy. I discussed how medication is worse than talk therapy but they both do the same thing.

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-This article talks about antidepressant drugs. It states how they are different than talk therapy.

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Antidepressants work, but their effects don't last as long as therapy.(GETTY IMAGES)The widespread use of safe, effective antidepressants like Prozac has put advocates of traditional psychotherapy on the defensive. Who wants to lie on a couch recounting their dreams at $160 an hour when they can pop a pill and hear birds chirping?

Fortunately the stereotype of talk therapy as a bastion of self-indulgent, unscientific chatter is changing as insurance companies and mental health experts press for more evidence-based treatment. The result, say patients and researchers, is growing proof that all types of talk therapy can be effective, even for patients whose problems are biochemical.

"Drugs and therapy are essential"
Joseph, 55, has been dealing with severe depression for 25 years. In psychotherapy he has learned to predict the chemical shifts in his brain that precipitated his debilitating depressions. Meanwhile, antidepressants have kept him functioning at an even keel between episodes. "For me, drugs and therapy turned out to be essential," he says.

"No compelling data suggests that everyone with depression must have both drug therapy and talk therapy," says William C. Sanderson, PhD, a psychology professor at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y.

Next Page: Drugs work faster, but not better [ pagebreak ] Drugs work faster, but not better
Medication often works faster than talk therapy. On the other hand, talk therapy promises something pills can't: the life skills for managing inappropriate emotions, countering negative thought patterns, and forging closer, more productive relationships. These tools can also help prevent subsequent episodes of depression.

More about depression

"Therapy is a commitment of time and money, and it's not a quick fix," says Jayne Bloch, a certified psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. "It puts you in a position of vulnerability—seeking help and opening yourself up to self-discovery. But the rewards are great. Getting to understand yourself and learning to experience the range of one's emotions helps to create more options in your life."

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Antidepressants work, but their effects don't last as long as therapy.(GETTY IMAGES)The widespread use of safe, effective antidepressants like Prozac has put advocates of traditional psychotherapy on the defensive. Who wants to lie on a couch recounting their dreams at $160 an hour when they can pop a pill and hear birds chirping?

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-This is my Ted Talk Video on depression. He talks about personal stories with depression and really helped me structure one of my paragraphs.

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Kevin Breel:  Confessions of a Depressed Comic at TEDxKids@Ambleside

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-In this source, it explains how drugs effect the brain. They explain how it can effect the synapses in the brain but also help people with disorders.

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All addictive drugs affect brain pathways involving reward-that is, the dopamine system in the reward pathway.

Within seconds to minutes of entering the body, drugs cause dramatic changes to synapses in the brain. By activating the brain's reward circuitry, drugs deliver a jolt of intense pleasure.

Synapse Activity Decreases

These brain scans highlight dopamine receptors, with areas of highest density shown in red. The meth abuser has severely reduced receptor levels. Other drugs, including alcohol, cocaine, and heroin, have the same effect. Images courtesy Dr. Nora Volkow, Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Drugs of abuse affect the brain much more dramatically than natural rewards, such as food and social interactions. To bring stimulation down to a more manageable level, the brain must try to adapt.

One way the brain compensates is to reduce the number of dopamine receptors at the synapse. In addition, sending neurons increase their number of dopamine transporters, more quickly clearing dopamine from the synapse. These changes make the brain less responsive to the drug, but they also decrease the brain's response to natural rewards.

Because of these changes, after the user has "come down," they will need more of the drug next time they want to get high. This response is commonly referred to as "tolerance."

Brain Connections Are Rewired

As the brain continues to adapt to the presence of the drug, regions outside of the reward pathway are also affected. Over time, brain regions responsible for judgment, decision-making, learning, and memory begin to physically change, making certain behaviors "hard-wired." In some brain regions, connections between neurons are pruned back. In others, neurons form more connections.

Once these changes take place, drug-seeking behavior becomes driven by habit, almost reflex. The drug user becomes a drug addict.

After cocaine use, connections between neurons in the nucleus accumbens, part of the reward pathway, increase in number, size, and strength.

Changes Last Long After Use

Stopping drug use doesn't immediately return the brain to normal. Some drugs have toxic effects that can kill neurons-and most of these cells will not be replaced. And while changes to connections between neurons in the brain may not be permanent, some last for months. Some research suggests the changes may even last for years.

Long-lasting brain changes can make it challenging for addicts to stay drug-free. They often experience intense cravings, leading to relapse.

Click on the mouse to the right to morph between the PET scans of a normal brain and the brain of a former cocaine addict.

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-This is my first article, the New York Times article. This is what got me interested in the topic and what got me started.

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Insight is a prerequisite of happiness, the theory goes, and well-being achieved without the hard work of psychotherapy is artificial and inauthentic.

But new evidence suggests that the talking cure and psychotropic medication have much more in common than had been thought. In fact, both produce surprisingly similar changes in the brain.

Take Eric's obsessive compulsive disorder. It hobbles patients with unwanted thoughts, often violent or sexual, that play in the mind like a broken record. Owing to the sometimes lurid nature of the thoughts, the treatment mainstay had for years been psychoanalytically oriented therapy to unlock the sexual and aggressive conflicts presumed to underlie the symptoms.

There was just one problem. That form of psychotherapy rarely, if ever, worked for those patients, a point now widely accepted by most psychoanalysts themselves.

But two seemingly different treatments can be highly effective: a form of talk therapy called cognitive-behavior therapy and a class of antidepressants called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor antidepressants, or S.S.R.I.'s, drugs like Prozac and Zoloft. It is well known that patients with the disorder have altered serotonin function compared with normal controls.

Brain imaging that uses PET scans, or positron emission topography, has shown that the disorder is associated with functional hyperactivity of the caudate nucleus, a structure buried beneath the cerebral cortex. Some researchers hypothesize that the caudate is part of a subcortical circuit that acts as a kind of filter, sifting out extraneous thoughts and impulses.

In obsessive compulsive disorder, they theorize, the subcortical filter malfunctions, allowing the unwanted thoughts to reach the cortex and then on to consciousness.

In a study by Dr. Lewis Baxter at the U.C.L.A. School of Medicine, patients with the disorder who responded to either a reuptake inhibitor like Prozac or cognitive behavior therapy over 10 weeks showed virtually the same changes in their brains, decreases in the activities of the caudate nuclei and, thus, changes toward normal function.

When patients improved, the changes in their brains, as shown in the PET scans, looked the same regardless of whether they had received antidepressants or psychotherapy.

An S.S.R.I. works, in part, by enhancing the neurotransmitter serotonin, whose activity is often abnormal in people with obsessive compulsive disorder and depression. Cognitive behavior therapy focuses on changing distorted patterns of thinking.

The intriguing finding from the PET scans is not limited to O.C.D. Two studies of patients with depression, reported last year in The Archives of General Psychiatry, compared the effects of interpersonal psychotherapy with an antidepressant on brain function, as observed in PET scans. In those studies, the depressed patients received interpersonal therapy, a short-term talk treatment that focuses on the effects of social relationships and major life events on mood.

In one study, a 12-week trial that compared an S.S.R.I., Paxil, to interpersonal psychotherapy, Dr. Arthur Brody, also at U.C.L.A., found that depressed patients who responded to either treatment had nearly identical changes in their brain function, a decrease in the abnormally high activity seen in the prefrontal cortex before treatment.

In the second study, Dr. Stephen D. Martin at the research unit of Cherry Knowle Hospital in Sunderland, England, reported that six weeks of Effexor, an antidepressant that enhances both serotonin and norepinephrine, and interpersonal therapy produced similar effects in those depressed subjects who responded either to medicine or to psychotherapy. Each had shown an increase in the activity of the basal ganglia, a subcortical brain structure.

Although the observed changes with psychotherapy and antidepressant were similar in that study, they were not identical. Subjects with interpersonal therapy but not Effexor also had activation of a brain area called the cingulate gyrus, which responds to serotonin in the brain and has a role in regulating mood.

The studies show that pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy can produce remarkably similar effects on functional brain activity. But does that mean that antidepressants and psychotherapy are really equivalent?

In a word, no. Psychotherapy alone has so far been largely ineffective for diseases like schizophrenia, where there is strong evidence of structural, as well as functional, brain abnormalities. So it seems that if the brain is severely disordered, then talk therapy cannot alter it.

But it is clear that talk therapy can alter brain function. The reason may come from the elegant work of a Nobel Prize-winning psychiatrist and neurobiologist, Dr. Eric Kandel. Studying the simple and well-mapped nervous system of a sea slug, Aplysia, Dr. Kandel showed that learning leads to the production of new proteins and, in turn, to the remodeling of neurons.

Sea slugs exposed to the controlled-learning condition that produced long-term memory ended up with double the number of neuronal connections as the untrained animals. In essence, Dr. Kandel has proved that learning involves the creation of new neuronal connections.

The clear implication for humans is that learning literally changes the structure and function of the brain.

Now it may seem a big leap from a snail to a human. But if psychotherapy is thought of as a form of learning, then when therapists talk to patients, they cause them to learn, perhaps changing their brain function and, perhaps, for the long run.

In the end, Eric chose cognitive behavior therapy and improved drastically. Through exposure to those situations that he feared like messy dirty places, he became desensitized to them and lost his compulsion to wash.

Had he chosen an antidepressant, chances are that he would also have improved.

If psychotherapy produces nearly the same brain changes as pharmacotherapy, then the boundary between mind and brain is purely artificial -- even unnatural.

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BEHAVIOR; Like Drugs, Talk Therapy Can Change Brain Chemistry

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Insight is a prerequisite of happiness, the theory goes, and well-being achieved without the hard work of psychotherapy is artificial and inauthentic. But new evidence suggests that the talking cure and psychotropic medication have much more in common than had been thought. In fact, both produce surprisingly similar changes in the brain.

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-This source is a very reliable source written by scientists. It talks about how talk therapy affects the brain positively. They say that talk therapy changes connections in the brain.

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A new study from King's College London and South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust has shown for the first time that cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) strengthens specific connections in the brains of people with psychosis, and that these stronger connections are associated with long-term reduction in symptoms and recovery eight years later.

CBT -- a specific type of talking therapy -- involves people changing the way they think about and respond to their thoughts and experiences. For individuals experiencing psychotic symptoms, common in schizophrenia and a number of other psychiatric disorders, the therapy involves learning to think differently about unusual experiences, such as distressing beliefs that others are out to get them. CBT also involves developing strategies to reduce distress and improve wellbeing.

The findings, published in the journal Translational Psychiatry, follow the same researchers' previous work which showed that people with psychosis who received CBT displayed strengthened connections between key regions of the brain involved in processing social threat accurately.

The new results show for the first time that these changes continue to have an impact years later on people's long-term recovery.

In the original study, participants underwent fMRI imaging to assess the brain's response to images of faces expressing different emotions, before and after six months of CBT. Participants were already taking medication when they took part in the study, and so were compared to a group receiving medication only. The group receiving medication only did not show any increases in connectivity, suggesting that the effects on brain connections could be attributed to the CBT.

For the new study, the health of 15 of the 22 participants who received CBT was tracked for eight years through their medical records. They were also sent a questionnaire at the end of this period to assess their level of recovery and wellbeing.

The results show that increases in connectivity between several brain regions -- most importantly the amygdala (the brain's threat centre) and the frontal lobes (which are involved in thinking and reasoning) -- are associated with long-term recovery from psychosis. This is the first time that changes in the brain associated with CBT have been shown to be associated with long-term recovery in people with psychosis.

Lead author of the study Dr Liam Mason from King's College London, who is a clinical psychologist at the Maudsley Hospital where the research took place, said: "This research challenges the notion that the existence of physical brain differences in mental health disorders somehow makes psychological factors or treatments less important. Unfortunately, previous research has shown that this 'brain bias' can make clinicians more likely to recommend medication but not psychological therapies. This is especially important in psychosis, where only one in ten people who could benefit from psychological therapies are offered them."

The researchers now hope to confirm the results in a larger sample, and to identify the changes in the brain that differentiate people who experience improvements with CBT from those who do not. Ultimately, the results could lead to better, and more tailored, treatments for psychosis, by allowing researchers to understand what determines whether psychological therapies are effective.

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mental health research; brain tumor; psychology research; nervous system; behavior; intelligence; brain-computer interfaces; brain injury

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Talking therapy changes the brain's wiring, study reveals for first time

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A new study from King's College London and South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust has shown for the first time that cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) strengthens specific connections in the brains of people with psychosis, and that these stronger connections are associated with long-term reduction in symptoms and recovery eight years later.

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-The book The Brain: The Story of You is written by David Eagleman. It is about every part of our brain and how it works. he goes into great detail bout memory, dreams, situations, everything.

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This is a very subjective question. Meaning it always depends on who you're asking. Because none of this has yet to be "proven" people will argue forThis is a very subjective question. Meaning it always depends on who you're asking. Because none of this has yet to be "proven" people will argue for whoever's research and theories they agree with. I can give you some of my own personal (and I try really hard to be objective and steer clear of opinions, but that will always have a role so that's just my warning label of sorts, ha) but because this is such a big topic today it'd help if you were more specific... do you mean subconscious mind just basically like how we make decisions, fears, etc or do you want to go deeper meaning the abnormal subconscious mind and/or subconscious mind of trauma, etc. there are so many good out there. If you want recs let me know, but another good way to find is to do a bit of research online and/or going to a book store and looking at several books that deal with your specific questions... I hope this helps! ...more (less)

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This is a very subjective question. Meaning it always depends on who you're asking. Because none of this has yet to be "proven" people will argue forThis is a very subjective question. Meaning it always depends on who you're asking. Because none of this has yet to be "proven" people will argue for whoever's research and theories they agree with.