Depression and the Inflamed Mind

Psychiatrist Edward Bullmore recalls the day as a young doctor he prescribed some drugs to a depressed patient assuring him these drugs would restore his low serotonin levels, the cause of his illness, and the patient replied;
“ How do you know I have low levels? They have never been tested.”
 
That was a light bulb moment for him.
 
Today Professor Bullmore from Cambridge University told a packed Hay audience that very little has changed in the understanding and development of drugs for mental illness in the past 30 years and now all research into new drugs has stopped.
 
Yet in the next 20 years depression will be the single biggest cause of disability.
So what’s going on? 
 
Now break through science has revealed a link between body and brain, stress, depression and inflammation.
 
The root of mental illness, he suggests, can lie in the immune system and stresses it is under. His book ‘The Inflamed Mind’ offers a radical new approach.
 
 He believes we have got it wrong by not treating the body and mind as one unit.
 
Those of us who have dabbled in holistic medicine intuitively already knew this.
 
Photo: Edward Bullmore book signing in the Hay Festival bookshop tent.