Dark Side: Stressful Stretches

 

 

Damage to the brain also shapes psychopathology in different ways depending on when it occurs. If at the age of two a child suffers damage to the orbital cortex, which is involved in ethics and morality, he may never develop a sense of right and wrong and may become profoundly psychopathic. If the damage occurs at the age of eight, the person’s orbital cortex may have helped other parts of the brain understand right and wrong, but he won’t be able to stop himself from committing wrong, as the orbital cortex is also involved in inhibition. If the damage occurs as a teenager or adult, the person will know right from wrong, and other areas of the brain involved in inhibition will be mature enough to help control impulsivity when the orbital cortex fails, but stressful conditions could easily push him over the edge.

 

Even without specific brain damage, several psychiatric diseases can rear their heads later in life. The brain’s cortices develop in an orderly fashion, with a large chunk of the ventral and orbital cortices developing faster than the dorsal prefrontal cortex during the early and later postnatal period. This means that the limbic, emotional brain starts to mature well before the thinking, cognitive brain. The sex steroid bursts released later, in puberty, tend to “set” the connectivity of these cortices, making them less malleable. Because of this, those preteens and teenagers with delayed development of the prefrontal cortex appear intellectually slower at first.

 

But the flip side of this coin is that development is protracted in many of these late-blooming teens, and their more plastic prefrontal synapses are thought to promote more learning capability over this developmental period. This may be one explanation for the recent finding that apparent IQ can be significantly different in someone who is tested around the time of puberty, and then later in adolescence. Some teens appear to start out with higher IQs and cognitive capabilities, but then regress later relative to their peers in the later teens and twenties. Since IQ is a measure relative to age, this doesn’t mean that such people have lost ability, only that as early bloomers they were seemingly smarter than their peers, only to develop much slower than others in the mid-and late teens. Beyond puberty, the next major prefrontal maturation occurs in the late teens through the early twenties, when inputs to the prefrontal cortex from dopamine and the other major monoamine neurotransmitters, serotonin and norepinephrine, mature. They segregate out into the different layers of these neocortices. When the layering of these neurotransmitters is complete in a person’s twenties, the brain is nearly fully mature.

 

An important corollary to this developmental step is that this is also the time when the diseases involving the monoamines such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder often display their first obvious symptoms. A typical pattern would be for a college freshman to experience his first psychotic episode during the early winter holiday period. Such alarming problems might be blamed on the rigors and failures of the first big exams, breakups with high school sweethearts, or other such stressful events. But one way to interpret such events is to look at them as inevitable for someone who has the genetic predisposition for schizophrenia, and whose prefrontal cortex is now primed to experience this psychotic break during a major stressful event.

 

These highly stressful events will likely occur at some point during these years, whether a college term, romantic relationship, or first job challenge precipitates it. Why do stressors precipitate such monoamine-related psychotic breaks? One reason is that stress releases a bomb of cortisol from the adrenal cortex, not only suppressing the immune system, but also blocking the COMT enzyme, especially in the prefrontal cortex. This blocking of the enzyme leads to a surge of dopamine, which floods the cortex and leads to altered firing of the neurons, which in schizophrenia can be associated with poor filtering of inputs, altered signal-to-noise processing by these neurons, and neuronal firing uncoupled from external reality, as well as drastic changes in mood. There are traits common in different forms of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, as well as some of the personality disorders, all developmentally staged psychiatric problems often found in early to late teens and early twenties. Stressful stretches of a young person’s life such as college, first marriage, and especially military combat couldn’t come at a worse time for the developing prefrontal cortex.

 

In overall, This is a big deal for the armed forces. A freshman and a senior in college are very different human beings. Sending kids to war at eighteen is ridiculous, as they’re still in an active state of frontal lobe development. The military uses psychological tests to make sure recruits are not crazy, but that won’t tell you how they’ll be in two years. If we’re going to have war, we shouldn’t let soldiers fight until they’re twenty-two or twenty-three. Although psychopathy can also become obvious in the teen years, it can sometimes be noticed in children three and four years old, probably because the ventral system—that is, the orbital cortex and amygdala—develop and mature much sooner in life than the dorsal system. So if there’s insufficient activity in these areas—a pattern associated with psychopathy—it will be seen sooner.

Acknowledgements:

www.politie.nl  and a Chief Inspector – Mr. Henk van Essen© from 1th of March 2024 new Politiekorpschef  Janny Knol

www.aived.nl    AIVD – Mr. Erik Akerboom ©

 

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