Fighting the Black Dog: A Conversation with Depression Expert Owen Wolkowitz
Owen Wolkowitz
Today on Science Café, we ponder whether one person’s depression might be biochemically different from another person’s depression, and whether depression itself might sometimes be part of a bigger, badder medical syndrome.
Winston Churchill, who led Britain through the Second World War, called depression his “black dog.” Black dog, wet blanket, whatever you call it – depression that lasts for months or years is estimated to afflict as many as one in six people in the United States at one time or another.
Three decades ago, vice presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton was dropped from the Democratic ticket after his electroconvulsive treatment for depression was publicized. The stigma has faded. With the advent of new drugs for depression that boost availability of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain, and in the wake of popular books such as Listening to Prozac, people started going public with their bouts with depression.
Many, though, still do not seek treatment. Some might think treatment is futile. But clinical researchers generally believe that most patients with depression will respond to one standard treatment or another, and will be relieved of symptoms more quickly than they would without treatment.
Efforts to predict which patients will respond to particular treatments are in their infancy. Today on the UCSF Science Café, we talk with Owen Wolkowitz, MD, director of the Psychopharmacology Assessment Clinic at UCSF’s Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute. He is not one of those whose research focuses only on key neurotransmitters. Instead, for more than a decade, he has been investigating the role of hormones in depression.
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Related Links
- Listening to Prozac: The Landmark Book About Antidepressants and the Remaking of the Self
- Amazon.com