Depression really does turn the world grey, study shows
July 23, 2010
Nicole Baute
LIVING REPORTER
Depression has long been associated with darkness and grey skies, but a new study suggests there might actually be a scientific basis for these cultural motifs.
A new paper published in Biological Psychiatry this month suggests people who are clinically depressed have difficulty detecting the contrast between black and white, which means that while they’re feeling blue the world might actually look dull or grey.
By attaching electrodes to the lower eyelids and ears of 40 depressed patients and 40 control subjects, lead author Dr. Ludger Tebartz van Elst and his team measured the electro-physiological response of the retina to flickering black-and-white checkerboards.
The participants who were clinically depressed had difficulty perceiving the contrast gain as the squares changed from white to black.
Tebartz van Elst, head of the section for neuropsychiatry and deputy director of the Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at Germany’s University of Freiburg, says it is difficult to say what this might look like for individual people, but that his best guess is that it is similar to seeing a picture in which the contrast has been reduced.
“You still see the image, you still see the person, you still recognize Bill or Bob or Jane, or whoever you have pictured, but the precise way of perception changes,” he says.
Tebartz van Elst says the relationship between depression and poor black-and-white contrast perception might exist because receptive fields in the retina that are critical for perceiving contrast involve dopamine, one of the key neurotransmitters involved in depression.
Tebartz van Elst says he and his team have discovered an “an objective marker of the subjective state of depression” which could have implications for diagnosis and treatment — particularly if studies on patients with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia produce different results.
Dr. Mark Berber, a psychiatrist at Markham Stouffville Hospital, professor at Queen’s University and lecturer at the University of Toronto, says his patients who struggle with depression often say things seem bleak; when they’re well, they say the world has a more vibrant colour.
“They notice the sky is blue, the grass is green,” he says. “When you’re depressed, everything seems grey and black.”
This phenomenon has long been noted in literature.
University of Toronto English professor Carroll Balot says that before the rise of modern science, melancholy was attributed to “black bile,” one of the four humours, believed to cast a shadow over the mind.
She is studying Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess, written in the early 14th century in middle English, in which Chaucer speaks of a melancholy state in which nothing is “desirable or hateful; all is alike good to me.”
Balot says this is an early example of a melancholy artist as lacking the “. . . ability to differentiate between good or bad, or beautiful or ugly, or black or white.”
Tebartz van Elst and his colleagues believe that when depression fades, the patient’s ability to detect contrast should return.
This experience was noted by Winston Churchill, who called his depression “the black dog.” In 1911, he wrote to his wife that his black dog had left him, at least for the time being.
“All the colours come back into the picture,” he wrote.
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