Immune system linked to mental health

Last time you had a bad cold, you likely had less energy than usual. After it dragged on for a day or two, a sense of helplessness probably set in. It was hard to remember what feeling good felt like or how you could ever bound off the couch again.

In short, for a few days, you probably felt a lot like someone with depression.

And increasingly, scientists think it’s no coincidence that a mental illness feels like a physical one.

Agrowing body of research on conditions from bipolar disorder to schizophrenia to depression is starting to suggest a tighter link than was previously realized between ailments of the mind and body.

Activation of the immune system seems to play a crucial role in both.

“One of the things we need to stop thinking is that mental health is just a disorder of the brain,” says researcher Georgia Hodes, of the Icahn Medical Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital, who conducted the mouse study. “There’s plenty of evidence in a number of different mental illnesses that they have components to them that relate to the entire body.”