Why You Can’t Remember the Good Times When You’re Depressed

“Remember that beach day?” You nod. Inside, there’s almost nothing: a vague feeling, maybe “I think it was nice.” The details won’t come.

When you’re depressed, happy memories can fade like photos left out in the sun. Researchers have studied why for decades. The memories are still there. The search is what goes wrong.

A summary instead of a moment

In one classic test, researchers give someone a word like “happy” and ask for one specific memory. People without depression say something like “that Saturday at the beach with my sister.” People with depression often say “I used to like the beach.” Scientists call this overgeneral memory, and it shows up again and again in depression (Williams et al., 2007).

Who does the searching

Picture your memory as a library. The shelves are a brain system called the default mode network, which holds the details of your life and builds them into scenes (Buckner et al., 2008).

The librarian runs the search. She’s your central executive network, just behind your forehead, and when you think about your own life, she and the library work together rather than taking turns (Spreng et al., 2010).

Three things that stop her early

• Worry loops pull her off course. She heads for the happy memory, a brooding thought grabs her on the way, and she ends up somewhere else.
• Some shelves hurt to visit. A happy memory can sting when it reminds you how different things feel now, so the mind steers around it.
• She’s tired. She runs out of focus before she reaches the details.

Those are the three explanations from a major review of this research (Williams et al., 2007), and brain scans back up the third: the central executive network is weaker in depression (Kaiser et al., 2015).

So she stops at the first shelf that looks close enough. Beach. Nice. I think.

It doesn’t help that the sad books sit on the front shelf. People with depressed mood recall negative information more readily (Gaddy & Ingram, 2014).

Finding them again

In people whose depression had lifted, memory problems were smaller (Rock et al., 2014).

You can also practice the search. Tonight, pick one good moment from this week. Where were you? What could you hear? What did your body feel? Stay with the details for a minute. That’s one rep for the librarian, and researchers have tested a whole workout built on it.

When the librarian needs more help

Each specific moment you reach for is a rep for the librarian. Talk therapy is practice at exactly this, rep after rep, with a guide. Medication helps many people too: in a review of 522 trials, every antidepressant studied worked better than a placebo (Cipriani et al., 2018). For a lot of people, that’s enough.

For some, it isn’t. If two or more antidepressants haven’t moved the needle, clinicians call that treatment-resistant depression, and there are options that work on the librarian’s wiring more directly, on top of medication.

To see why they work, picture a seesaw. The librarian’s home behind your forehead and the sad room, area 25, move in opposite directions: when one goes up, the other goes down (Mayberg et al., 1999). In depression, the sad room is up and the librarian is down. Both treatments push on that seesaw.

Spravato is a nasal spray related to ketamine. It works on the hardware. In animal studies, ketamine regrew lost connections between brain cells in the front of the brain, the librarian’s part, and those new connections were what kept the improvement going (Moda-Sava et al., 2019). In people who hadn’t improved after at least two antidepressants, adding Spravato led to more improvement within four weeks (Popova et al., 2019).

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) aims magnetic pulses at the librarian’s home, area 46, and it asks a bit more of you: sessions at a clinic over several weeks, and some discomfort while the pulses tap. The spots that work best are the ones most tightly tied, in opposite directions, to the sad room (Fox et al., 2012). In brain scans taken before and after a course of TMS, the sad room’s grip on the library loosened (Liston et al., 2014). In real-world clinics, 58% of people who hadn’t improved with antidepressants responded, and 37% went into remission (Carpenter et al., 2012).

As she recovers, the search runs further: past the summary, all the way to the sunny Saturday. If good memories have felt out of reach for a while, tell a mental health clinician. It’s a recognized part of depression, and it responds to treatment.

Prefer to watch? The full video, with the whole library story, is here.

Keep reading

• The Real Reason Depression Makes You Forgetful (It Shows on Brain Scans)
• Why Depression Won’t Let a Bad Memory Go
• What Actually Happens to Your Brain’s Memory Center During Depression
• The Memory Workout That Also Lowered Depression Symptoms

Educational information only, not medical advice. If you are in crisis, call or text 988.

Sources

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