Journalist Rebecca Ruiz wrote this article about good and bad stress for California Magazine, the magazine for the University of California, Berkeley, Alumni Association.
“If you go and look at the literature, we know there is a correlation between stress and mental illness,”
[Daniela] Kaufer [associate professor of integrative biology at U.C. Berkeley] said. “We don’t have much of a mechanism to explain why.”
Her study made a convincing argument. Kaufer and her colleagues immobilized adult mice repeatedly and analyzed what happened to their brains. They observed a long, complicated domino effect in which stress can override the function of cells designed to become neurons. Instead, they turn into cells that ultimately produce more white matter in the brain.
White matter, although essential to survival, has been seen in abundance in the brains of patients who experience schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. It is made up of neuronal fibers that are wrapped in insulation called myelin. This sheathing allows the brain to make faster, better connections—and some researchers, including Kaufer, hypothesize that excess myelin can strengthen the connection between parts of the brain that regulate fear and emotion, allowing stress signals to strike quickly and intensely.
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