Depression is devastating, and there is no shame in getting treatment.

There's a difference between feeling the stress and distress of living in a bustling, demanding city like New York and having a disease called depression. Depression is a disease and, as such, we need to diagnose it and we need to treat it because we can make a difference.

Monitoring depression is very important. Often people come in for treatment when they are starting to get worse.

Unfortunately, the spectrum of treatment options for depression in pregnant women is narrow, and other medicines, such as benzodiazepines, carry a Category D pregnancy risk factor with a significant confirmed risk to human fetuses.

One reason we're not winning the fight against depression is that our available treatments leave so many in partial recovery limbo.

For depression, there is no single medication or therapy that has been found to work as a primary treatment for most patients. We found that people with depression who have increased activity in one area of the brain and decreased activity in another in response to emotional stimuli are more likely to respond to a specific treatment--cognitive therapy. If this finding holds true, we may be able to predict what therapies will be most effective for individual patients by using imaging technology, bypassing the lengthy trial and error process that is often necessary to find the right treatment.