Dresp-Langley, B. From Reward to Anhedonia-Dopamine Function in the Global Mental Health Context. Biomedicines 2023, 11, 2469. https://doi.org/10.3390/biomedicines11092469
Dresp-Langley, B. From Reward to Anhedonia-Dopamine Function in the Global Mental Health Context. Biomedicines 2023, 11, 2469. https://doi.org/10.3390/biomedicines11092469
Dresp-Langley, B. From Reward to Anhedonia-Dopamine Function in the Global Mental Health Context. Biomedicines 2023, 11, 2469. https://doi.org/10.3390/biomedicines11092469
Dresp-Langley, B. From Reward to Anhedonia-Dopamine Function in the Global Mental Health Context. Biomedicines 2023, 11, 2469. https://doi.org/10.3390/biomedicines11092469
Abstract
When “hijacked” by compulsive behaviors that affect the reward and stress centers of the brain, functional changes in dopamine circuitry occur as the consequence of pathological brain adaptation. As a brain explanans for mental health, with a central functional role in behavioral regulation from healthy reward seeking to pathological adaptation to stress in response to adversity, we may use dopamine regulation in interaction with other brain mechanisms, as discussed herein, to gather a deeper insight into environmentally triggered mental health changes to understand, for example, specific behavioral changes observed during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Pandemic-related adversities, the stresses they engendered, and the long lockdown periods where people had to rely on digital tools to get feed-back rewards via the internet can be seen as the major triggers of changes in motivation and reward seeking behavior worldwide. The pathological adaptation of dopamine-mediated reward circuitry in the brain offers a highly plausible explanation why, when pushed by fate and circumstance into a physiological brain state of anti-reward, human behavior and mental health changesalmost inevitably depending on individual vulnerability to stress. A unified conceptual account that places dopamine function at the centre of the current global mental health context is proposed.
Keywords
Dopamine; Brain; Reward; Stress; Pathological Adaptation; Behavior; Covid19 pandemic; Digital Addiction; Global Mental Health
Subject
Public Health and Healthcare, Other
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
