Unraveling the roots of depression – it’s complicated

ABSTRACT

The present work comments on Watt’s Target Article, which argues that focusing on separation distress, a relevant construct from Pankseppian affective neuroscience theory, might help to shed new light on depression. This represents an important new research avenue, because Watt’s recent work shows the difficulties in understanding depression, a devastating state of mind with millions around the globe being afflicted. Several key points of Watt’s work are summarized and reflected on.

KEYWORDS:

• Depression
• Panksepp
• affective neuroscience
• separation distress
• panic

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Please note that Jaak Panksepp coined the brain system being activated by separation distress in his early career as PANIC system, and later changed to the SADNESS or PANIC/GRIEF nomenclature.

2 Please note that in studies investigating primary emotional systems as traits, depressed patients still were characterized by tremendously higher SADNESS than healthy controls (Montag et al., 2022) and state shifts of the SEEKING/SADNESS system might develop very differently when comparing depressed patients and their course of depression. Insofar, we believe low SEEKING / high SADNESS constellations to be highly relevant to understand depression, at least in the earlier manifestations of depression.

3 Please note that also other associations such as with lower PLAY, higher FEAR and depressive tendencies could be observed in this work.

4 https://psycnet.apa.org/search/basic (stats from 10th August 2023).