Depression in the 21st Century: Enter Neurobiology

The more I research and read about depression, the more questions I have about this brain disease, and the more I realize I don't know.

For example, it's difficult to wrap my brain (no pun intended) around the "circuit-board" model of major depression--the connection between specific sets of nerve cells in different regions of the brain--explained by researchers like Helen S. Mayberg, M.D., professor of psychiatry and neurology at Emory School of Medicine.

I'm fascinated by research programs that use high tech brain-imaging to define what Mayberg calls "the critical neural pathways that mediate normal and abnormal mood states."

I'm intrigued by this not-so-new notion that depression is not just a chemical imbalance in the brain. It's much more complicated and involved than that--which is why neurology and psychiatry have to work in tandem to figure out how best to treat it.

In her exceptionally well-researched article, "Depression: Beyond Serotonin" (Psychology Today), journalist and editor Hara Estroff Marano clarifies so many confusing myths and concepts about depression that are simply out-dated based on the emerging field of neurobiology.

The article is too long and complex to throw at you in one post, so I'll split it up into bite sizes over the next few days.

Here's the beginning:

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New research is challenging the assumption that the world's most common mental ailment is just a chemical imbalance in the brain.

Melancholy is a fertile muse. No sooner had William Styron become the poet laureate of depression after describing his bout with madness in "Darkness Visible" when all manner of confessions followed. Mike Wallace. Art Buchwald. Dick Cavett lined up to disclose their own struggles with the disabling disorder. It quickly became acceptable, even chic, to publicly confide vulnerability to depression.