A New Approach to Depression

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Worldwide, depression will be the single biggest cause of disability in the next 20 years. But treatment for it has not changed much in the last three decades. However, new research into the immune system could be about to have breakthrough impact.

Professor Edward Bullmore, professor of psychiatry at the University of Cambridge, visits the RSA to reveal the game-changing new science on the link between depression and inflammation of the body and brain. He explains how and why we now know that mental disorders can have their root cause in the immune system, and outlines a future revolution in which treatments could be specifically targeted to break the vicious cycle of stress, inflammation and depression.

Going beyond the clinic and the lab, Professor Bullmore presents a whole new way of looking at how mind, brain and body all work together in a sometimes misguided effort to help us survive in a hostile world. Offering insights into the story of Western medicine, he shows how we have got it wrong as well as right in the past, and how we could start getting to grips with depression and other mental disorders much more effectively in the future.