Hi, Lynne Malcolm here. You may have heard Dr Alex Corb in the last episode of All in the Mind, speaking about some of the small changes we can make in our daily lives

to prevent the development of more significant mental health problems.

Well, I thought you might like to hear the full conversation I had with him.

He's a neuroscientist from the Department of Psychiatry at UCLA

and author of The Upward Spiral, Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression,

one small change at a time.

Alex, those who have not experienced depression could think that it's feeling sad all the time,

but it's not as simple as that, is it?

I wonder if you could describe your personal experience of depression first, just to get a sense

of that. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's an interesting question. Actually, I've never been diagnosed

with depression, so I couldn't say for sure that I've had it, though I've had periods of my life

where in reflecting back on it, I'm like, oh, yeah, that was probably depression for at least part of it.

Like, I just remember some times in college where just everything felt really heavy.

Like, it just like took a lot of effort to move

and I wasn't really excited about doing things.

Like I wouldn't say that I was like sad per se.

There just like wasn't a lot of joy and everything felt very effortful and it wasn't

too exciting to think about the future so describe what happens in the brain with depression how

does what you call the downward spiral work?

I think one of the things that I learned in grad school and studying depression and trying

to nail this all down is that there isn't one thing that depression is. I just described

the way that I experienced it, but it can present very differently

...