Name: 【TED】Rebecca Brachman: Could a drug prevent depression and PTSD? (Could a drug prevent depression and PTSD? | Rebecca Brachman)
Uploaded: 2017-01-14T01:47:03.000Z
Duration: 18 min 24 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Basic passive voice

and at the time this picture was taken in the late 1800s,

We had no idea what was causing this disease.

it was your constitution that made you susceptible.

And it was a highly romanticized disease.

And some people actually thought it gave you heightened sensitivity

we instead knew that tuberculosis was caused

by a highly contagious bacterial infection,

of us being able to maybe develop drugs to treat it.

So doctors had discovered a new drug, iproniazid,

that they were optimistic might cure tuberculosis,

One medical report actually says they were "dancing in the halls."

this was not necessarily because they were getting better.

Another medical report describes them as being "inappropriately happy."

And that is how the first antidepressant was discovered.

So accidental discovery is not uncommon in science,

but it requires more than just a happy accident.

You have to be able to recognize it for discovery to occur.

As a neuroscientist, I'm going to talk to you a little bit

with whatever you want to call the opposite of dumb luck --

we've developed some other drugs and we can actually now cure tuberculosis.

And at least in the United States, though not necessarily in other countries,

and probably most of you are not too worried about TB.

But a lot of what was true in the early 1900s

we can say now about psychiatric disorders.

We are in the middle of an epidemic of mood disorders

like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

One in four of all adults in the United States

which means that if you haven't experienced it personally

it's still very likely that someone you know has,

as the leading cause of disability worldwide.

And also, like tuberculosis in the 1950s,

from an antihistamine that was making people manic,

And in both the case of the tuberculosis ward and the antihistamine,

that a drug that was designed to do one thing --

treat tuberculosis or suppress allergies --

could be used to do something very different --

And this sort of repurposing is actually quite challenging.

When doctors first saw this mood-enhancing effect of iproniazid,

they didn't really recognize what they saw.

from the framework of being a tuberculosis drug

as a side effect, an adverse side effect.

a lot of these patients in 1954 are experiencing severe euphoria.

And they were worried that this might somehow interfere

So they recommended that iproniazid only be used in cases of extreme TB

and in patients that were highly emotionally stable,

which is of course the exact opposite of how we use it as an antidepressant.

They were so used to looking at it from the perspective of this one disease,

they could not see the larger implications for another disease.

And to be fair, it's not entirely their fault.

Functional fixedness is a bias that affects all of us.

It's a tendency to only be able to think of an object

in terms of its traditional use or function.

That's sort of this preconceived framework

And that actually makes repurposing pretty hard for all of us,

which is, I guess, why they gave a TV show to the guy who was,

So the effects in both the case of iproniazid and imipramine,

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【TED】Rebecca Brachman: Could a drug prevent depression and PTSD? (Could a drug prevent depression and PTSD? | Rebecca Brachman)

weird

sort

chronic

mental