The facial expressions that can reveal whether someone is suffering from severe depression

Doctors may soon be able to diagnose severe depression simply by looking at a person’s face.

This type of depression, called melancholia, is characterized by a complete loss of interest in daily activities and the inability to respond to any pleasure, sleep problems, slow movements, speech and thoughts, agitation, restlessness, body pain and concentration problems.

According to researchers, about five to ten percent of depressed people suffer from melancholia – which could represent as many as two million Americans.

Now, a study has found that people with early-stage melancholia make different facial expressions when looking at certain material.

Those who suffer from the serious condition show little to no emotion on their faces when they look at something. In contrast, people with regular depression were still able to laugh and emote while watching funny videos.

Similarly, people with melancholy had less brain activity in the regions responsible for producing emotions and some facial movements, suggesting that the way they feel emotions is blunted.

This could explain why some people with melancholy report a feeling of numbness and disinterest, because their emotions are reduced on a biological level.

The views above show the six facial expressions that people with regular depression made while watching a funny video, which people with melancholy did not make while watching videos

When watching clips with both happy and sad content, people with melancholy had no facial expressions. People with less severe depression are still emotional during funny scenes

Study author Dr. Philip Mosley said the study shows the biology behind what scientists have suspected since the time of the ancient Greeks: Some people’s depression causes them to develop actual physical changes.

Dr. Mosley, a neuropsychiatrist at the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Australia, told Science Alert: “So they stop eating, they lose the ability to sleep, they seem slowed down as if they were walking through concrete.” Their thinking speed decreases significantly and they are often very ill.’

The study, published in the journal Molecular psychiatryshowed 70 depressed people, of whom 30 had melancholy and 40 not, two different videos.

The first video was an excerpt from Ricky Gervais’ stand-up comedy set “Animals,” featuring funny skits about nature documentaries.

The second video was a short film called “The Butterfly Circus,” which tells a moving story about a circus troupe that inspires hope in Depression-era America.

The researchers then recorded the participants’ brain and facial activity as they watched each movie, first using facial tracking machines and then using an MRI scanner.

The face-tracking machine revealed that no matter what content the melancholic people watched, their facial muscles did not move.

They didn’t laugh, frown or grimace. Their faces maintained a uniform expression throughout the test.

However, those with regular depression still giggled and smiled during Gervais’s clips.

Inside the MRI machine, the participants’ brains revealed a similar story.

Dr. Mosley said of people with melancholia: “Those emotional brain areas – those involved in detecting and responding to stimuli with an emotional tone – were just doing their own thing, separate from each other.”

The 2011 film Melancholia starred Kirsten Dunst as a woman with the condition. In this, her depression gives her an intense feeling of apathy and emptiness, which she initially has difficulty with

This was especially evident in a part of the brain called the cerebellum, a ball-like structure located near the area of ​​the head where the spine connects to the brain.

The cerebellum is responsible for a number of automatic body functions, including balance, eye movements and some emotions. People with melancholy had less brain activity here and correspondingly fewer emotional faces when watching both videos.

Dr. Mosley said spreading awareness about this lack of emotion could help doctors distinguish between melancholia and regular depression earlier — and while melancholia is a more serious condition, it is still treatable.

These patients tend not to respond well to traditional talk therapy, so diagnosing them early could also help create a more tailored treatment plan for them, Dr. Mosley suggested.

If a person with the condition is diagnosed early, most people respond very well to medications, which work to balance brain chemistry, says Dr. Mosley.

And faster treatment can help them avoid the most invasive therapies that may be necessary if the condition worsens.

These include electroconvulsive therapy – which uses an electrical current to cause a brief seizure and change brain chemistry to improve symptoms – and transcranial magnetic stimulation – which uses magnetic pulses to stimulate certain parts of the brain to improve the symptoms of depressive disorders.