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. That’s distinctly odd, given the social burden these illnesses bring in their train and the immense amount of attention they have drawn from the neuroscientific community. Nor is there any discussion of the reasons for their omission.  But, given Nord’s chosen focus, what does she have to tell us about the roots of depression and anxiety in the brain? How well does she substantiate her claim that these are purely diseases of the brain, and since she also wants to connect neuroscientific findings to effective forms of intervention, what does she have to offer on that front?

She places considerable emphasis on scanning technology as a source of information about what is happening in the brain.  She cites two sorts: Positron Emission Tomography or PET scans; and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging or fMRIs.