Gordon Johnson's Final Comment

Thomas A. Ban: From Melancholia to Depression
A History of Diagnosis and Treatment
Collated by Olaf Fjetland

            This comprehensive and scholarly review of depression, its diagnosis and treatment, is on one hand a remarkable story of antidepressant drug discovery, but on the other hand it highlights their clinical use complicated by Diagnostic uncertainties and the inability to predict drug response. Initiation of treatment is always accompanied with the information that effective treatment response cannot be predicted and, despite the variety of different pharmacological agents available, they are all equally effective. The pathophysiology of depression that underlies its clinical heterogeneity remains unknown and in the absence of a biological marker, the diagnostic criteria remain provisional and their validity uncertain.

 October 12, 2017