One important cause of Sickness Syndrome depression is chronic stress, or distress. In a normal and healthy state, stress is actually a positive reaction. It enhances your long term memory, fuels your muscles, and helps you to quickly respond to an immediate threat. However, if you experience repeated stressful events (physical, mental or emotional) without giving your body a chance to recover from each one of those events, you will eventually experience distress, which is a negative stress reaction — and the cause of nine out of 10 visits to a doctor's office in the US today.

Distress leads to your body’s inability to use cortisol effectively. A hormone secreted by your adrenal stress glands (two glands that sit atop the kidneys that play a major role in regulating the stress response), cortisol is the key to making sure that your body does not overproduce inflammatory cytokines (which cause silent inflammation in the body, associated with heart disease, cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, depression, anxiety and sleep disorders). You can view cortisol as the switch that turns off the production of these inflammatory cytokines when the time is right.

However, chronic stress or insufficient recovery time from stressful events can diminish your body’s ability to rely on cortisol to regulate the inflammatory response. This leads to production by your brain of those same inflammatory cytokines — the process that causes Sickness Syndrome depression.

Sickness Syndrome depression can be caused by an inflammatory disorder or a somatic illness that has an inflammatory component (e.g. heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, cancer, obesity, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome), an inability to handle stress in a healthy way (due to post traumatic stress, major traumatic events, or compromised cortisol function), or a hormone imbalance (e.g. menopause, PMS, andropause).

Take the Sickness Syndrome Inflammation in the Brain and Depression Assessment to help determine if you may be experiencing Sickness Syndrome depression.