HokieTalks: Targeting the Body to Treat the Brain

[00:00:00] >> Thank you thank you so much for the introduction. So thank you guys all so much also for coming here today especially so early in the morning and I'm going to be talking to you guys today to about depression so just show of hands how many people in the room know someone who has depression. [00:00:24] For it look around. Almost everyone in this room has been touched by depression if I had asked to how many people in this room have depression about twenty percent would have raised your hand including me and if I asked how many of you had been treated for depression successfully only about half of those would be able to put their hands down I think what that means half the people with depression do not get successful treatment so I was really lucky Prozac worked great for me it completely transformed my life it's part of why I went into neuroscience I wanted to understand what depression is and I also wanted to help the people who weren't so lucky and this this really hit home for me when I was at a scientific conference and some news outlets picked up my work and put it out there and I came back to my room and I had about one hundred e-mails from patients with treatment resistant depression and some of them just wanted to say thank you for doing the research some of them wanted more information but some of them wanted to volunteer their services as human guinea pigs for my research and I was working in my case. [00:01:36] I mean I think how desperate you have to be to