Signal Blues

In 1992, American writer Andrew Solomon, then in his late-20s, was about to publish his first novel when he unexpectedly slid into a major depression. In a subsequent book, he wrote that the experience is "almost unimaginable" to the uninitiated. Describing it, he likened himself to an oak being strangled by a vine, "a sucking thing that had wrapped itself around me, ugly and more alive than I." He called up the image of falling into an abyss: "You hit invisible things over and over again, until you are shredded." And he mentioned the fleeting terror anyone feels who trips and is about to fall: "I felt that way hour after hour after hour."¹

Even as Solomon struggled with his demon, scientists were undertaking an effort to describe depression in terms of molecular biology. Evidence is growing that a key mechanism underlying major depression--a sometimes heritable, often lifetime illness,...