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Feb. 27th, 2021 21:07Q: Can years long chronic depression IRREVERSIBLY "damage" the brain/ reduce or eliminate the ability to viscerally feel emotions?
A: Yes and no.
The literal physical answer is that depression isn't "brain damage" of any kind, it's a dysfunction, and if that dysfunction goes away you're left with a completely intact brain.
The answer to what I think you're asking, can depression permanently effect your ability to feel emotions, is complicated. In most people the answer is that people who truly overcome depression end up with a typical emotional balance but have the perspective to not take that for granted, so if anything they probably end up slightly happier and better adjusted than average. I say "overcome" because often depression isn't "cured" so much as treated in the long term, and also because some forms of depression come and go cyclically. Those two reasons are why depression is seen as hard to beat, because it legitimately does have a habit of coming back either when people stop taking their meds, or because it never actually left.
So far so good, right? Well the problem is that people who experience clinical depression while growing up, can develop emotionally with depression as an assumption. So let's look at the example of a teenager who's depressed from the years of 13-15. This person is probably not "permanently damaged" depression. The thing is that, yes they experienced life through the lens of depression for 2 years, but they also experienced life without depression for far longer. So their understanding of emotion still includes the full range of human experience.
Now let's take the example of a poor soul who experiences clinical depression beginning at age 12, and continuing into their 20s. Depending on when they began puberty, they have potentially been clinically depressed for the entirety of their adult life. Their understanding of emotion, and their coping mechanisms, all assume depression as a constant factor. This has the effect of taking normal post-depression coping mechanisms and making them difficult or impossible to change. So a person who experienced an abusive relationship for their entire childhood might have, as a core assumption, that everyone they meet is deceiving them or that everyone they meet is inches away from anger or violence. People who have experienced depression can associate happiness with anxiety, believing if they drop their guard things will simply get worse. If someone was always depressed for a large portion of their childhood, that guarded attitude might simply be how their brain is wired.
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