A New Focus on Depression
▻http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/23/a-new-focus-on-depression/?_r=0
Although we have learned much about depression (...) we still don’t understand its fundamental cause. The old idea that the disease results from a deficiency of a single neurotransmitter like serotonin or dopamine is clearly simplistic and wrong.
Maybe psychiatrists and neuroscientists have something to learn from the successful hunt for the Higgs boson.
Of course a debilitating disease has nothing in common with a subatomic particle, except that both are mysterious and elusive. But it was those very qualities that inspired international teams of physicists to work together for years until they finally identified the boson last year.
(...)
But at a time when federal research funds are shrinking and major drug companies have all but shuttered their brain research programs, enlightened philanthropists and entrepreneurs are helping to open a promising new pathway for neuroscience research: collaboration among researchers willing and able to take thoughtful risks and solve big problems.