Hormones, Depression, and Anxiety

Doctor Daniel Pine explains that hormones are a contributing factor to the development of anxiety and depression. They interact with a number of other factors to cause to these disorders.

Most problems with emotion involve many different factors and they all kind of make small to medium contributions. Hormones fall into that category of influences. Hormones can have some effect on emotions and some effect on anxiety and some effect on depression, but hormones are not enough in and of themselves to lead people to be anxious or depressed. For example, we know that there is this strong relationship between puberty, particularly in girls, which is something that involves hormones and depression. On the other hand, most girls who go through puberty even if they have very high hormone levels will not get depressed. So, it is not enough to just have high levels of hormones, you need something else. For example, maybe girls who have high levels of hormones have particularly stressful environments and grow up in families where there is a lot of depression. Once you have all three of those things, maybe that is what you need to get depressed.