So it’s not that people with depression hate music, it’s that when they listen to music, their brains may not respond with the pleasure rewards usually associated with listening to music.
Basically, depression interferes with the body’s ability to produce and distribute dopamine, which can result in feeling a loss of pleasure and motivation. The problem is that people with depression are often dopamine deficient, and people who have major depressive disorders have high rates of dopamine dysregulation. Basically, music helps our brain make happy chemicals that affect how we feel, make choices, learn, and even how and what we remember. When humans listen to music, the brain begins producing dopamine - a chemical that gives us feelings of wellbeing and pleasure - and that dopamine positively impacts the parts of the brain that are associated with emotion, learning, memory and decision making. It is common for people with depression to lose interest in anything that they usually find pleasurable, he explains.Īnd while science hasn’t really figured out why music brings us pleasure, recent research has used positron emission tomography (PET) scans and MRIs to observe what happens in our brains when we listen to music. “I describe it to people as the difference between watching a show in color versus black and white while you can still see what's happening, your experience is significantly dulled,” says O’Brien. “Depression can present as a general ‘flattening’ of interest in life,” explains John O’Brien, a psychologist in Maine and professor of psychology at the University of Maine, tells me. Most experts seem to agree that losing interest in music is common in people experiencing depression not actually because of music itself in particular, but because depression causes people to lose the ability to feel pleasure in general. There are hundreds of thousands of posts on social media made by depressed people asking why they can’t stand listening to music. Not to be dramatic (okay, a little dramatic) but why am I being punished by my own brain? Given the fact that listening to music has been clinically shown to improve your mood, this feels profoundly unfair. This is such a reliable pattern in my life that I can use my playlist usage as a barometer for my mental health - when I'm really struggling, no music will bring me joy. When I'm depressed, I don't listen to any music at all.
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