almost_drhouse

Yes, that's the Mad Libs answer...as in, if you had to fill in one & only one word for possible depression sources, you would say "imbalances in _(neurotransmitter)_" and the answer most people would put would be serotonin. That many anti-depressants target the serotonergic system is good evidence. But, as the adage goes: "a headache is not an absence of Advil"

But everytime I get a new message it makes me happy, whereas Google doesn't have feelings.

"You’re just talking about researching a stupid fucking parasite… you’re not saving the world, you’re not time traveling, you didn’t invent a nuclear weapons, you didn’t invent a faster internet. It isn’t like you came up with ’5g’. You played a scientist during a PhD, and you were good at it. Thankyou. thankyou for distracting me for an hour and a half while I read your paper, because that’s all the fuck you did, okay? You made me sit down, and I enjoyed your performance, and it made me not think about my life and I got some thrills out of it. It was very exciting and enjoyable to follow along. That’s it. That’s all you did. You didn’t fucking change the world, you’re not awesome, you’re just good at pretending.”

Ah, a non-skeptic! Thanks!

My major interest is in the potential link to schizophrenia. I think there are many social stigmas and misconceptions about mental illnesses where people think that, maybe, the disease is really just a lack of will to try, or perhaps a weakness of personality or constitution or effort. Mostly this is because we have no idea what diseases like schizophrenia or depression are. Once we do, perhaps some of the stigma will go away.

This cartoon sums it up nicely: http://imgur.com/CWFTYoV

As a good analogy, ulcers used to be thought of, too, as weakness in personality. One could be ulceric. But then we figured out it's just a bacteria and the stigma around ulcers disappeared overnight. My hope is that if some causes of schizophrenia turn out to be pathogenic -- caused by a parasite -- people will start seeing mental illness as less of a constitutional weakness and more like having a cold or other diseases that are Not Their Fault.

They are! But, not all of them. My findings (not published yet) mostly involve looking at the differences between individual mice that get Toxo. As in, some mice that get Toxo are less afraid of cats, but some are the exact same amount of afraid. This makes sense, because Toxo can go anywhere in the brain, so it probably matters where it ends up.

So, I looked in the brains and found where all the Toxo was. Abstractly, the idea was: maybe those mice that had Toxo in 'brain region X' were all not afraid, and those mice that didn't have Toxo in 'brain region X' were still just as afraid. That would greatly implicate brain region X and argue that maybe Toxo is doing something in that brain region. I did indeed find this, but I need to keep my lips sealed until it's actually published.