Are we any closer to finding a cure for depression?

Some years ago, the Harvard psychiatrist Leon Eisenberg commented that, in the course of his lifetime, his discipline had swung from the brainless psychiatry propounded by psychoanalysts to the mindless psychiatry of those enamoured of biological reductionism and neuroscience. 

Camilla Nord, who runs a neuroscience laboratory at Cambridge, is firmly a member of the latter camp. Though in a few places in The Balanced Brain she is driven to concede that social factors seem to play a role in mental health or mental distress, she immediately insists that ‘the process by which social factors are able to cause mental illness is entirely biological’. With the zeal of a true believer, she promises that she is going ‘to tell you what neuroscience reveals about how mental health works’.

By and large, she focuses her attention on depression and anxiety. Such major forms of mental illness as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are mentioned glancingly on a handful of occasions (on five and three pages respectively) and receive no serious or sustained attention.