Depression Is a Pandemic. Let ’s Use the Lessons of COVID-19 to Find Treatments

A version of this article also appeared in theIt’s Not Just You newsletter. Sign up here to receive a new edition every Sunday. This week, we have a special Mental Health Awareness Month edition of It’s Not Just You. In addition to the piece below, you can read a guest essay from Ciara Alyse Harris, one of the stars of the hit musical, Dear Evan Hansen here. My dad, who was always intuitive, told us he saw that my little sister’s depression had returned when he printed photographs he’d taken of her. “I could see it in her eyes, like a ghost,” he said. It was an observation born of love and experience, not science, but not wrong. Until recently, major depression has felt like a ghost disease–invisible but devastating. It’s a disorder that still affects millions every year–one in four of us will suffer a depressive episode in their lifetime. Despite those numbers and the fact that humans have been documenting and speculating about it for millennia, we’re only beginning to understand its biology. How differently would we think about depression if we could visualize it, track it and fight it the way we do cancer or the novel coronavirus? Thanks to some astounding new research, we’re getting closer to finding out. In April, a team at the Indiana University School of Medicine published news about a promising new blood test that can reveal how severe a patient’s depression may be, the risk of developing seve...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized It's Not Just You Source Type: news