So this changes things a bit

The Sunday Ideas section of the Boston Globe is always interesting. They've covered a lot of good shit recently.

This week they ran an article titled, Head Fake that describes new research about Prozac's effect on the brain. It turns out there is a reason that Prozac is so successful at treating depression symptoms in so many people... but its not the reason they thought.

The effectiveness of Prozac, these scientists say, has little to do with the amount of serotonin in the brain. Rather, the drug works because it helps heal our neurons, allowing them to grow and thrive again.

In this sense, Prozac is simply a bottled version of other activities that have a similar effect, such as physical exercise. They aren't happy pills, but healing pills.

Awesome! I'm no neuropsychologist, but as a psychology geek I can recognize that this is kind of a big deal. As in, this completely changes the way that we'll have to think about not only depression, but about Prozac and specifically fluoxetine (the active drug). The more we understand about the problem, the better able we are to treat it. Any any drug that actually heals the brain is ok by me.

But even beyond the obvious implications, I think this could have a serious impact on the social conception of depression and mental illness in general. Depression becomes more accessible when you talk about it in more tangible, biological terms.

"The best way to think about depression is as a mild neurodegenerative disorder," says Ronald Duman, a professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at Yale. "Your brain cells atrophy, just like in other diseases [such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's]. The only difference with depression is that it's reversible. The brain can recover."

Across the board, mental illness, from anxiety to schizophrenia, is so misunderstood on a societal level that its embarrassing. Advancements like this not only provide hope that people living with depression can recover their lives, but that one day they can get the personal and professional support necessary to recover fully. This could be HUGE!