Where does Resilience against Depression Reside in the Brain?

Resilience is in psychiatry the positive capacity of people to cope with stress and catastrophe. In this post it's used as having an adaptive system that uses exposure to stress to provide resistance to future negative events. Stress can lead to depression accompanied by atrophy and loss of neurons in the adult hippocampus in experimental studies. The effect of stress or whether you can become depressed due to stress seem to depend on individual characteristics. One characteristic is gene expression. Is it in your genes? Caspi et al showed that the 5-HTT genotype (serotonin transporter gene) moderates the depressogenic influence of .....read more »