Another promising antidepressant bit the dust this week. Jonah Lehrer reports on why we still haven't figured out a cure:
Pharmaceutical failures like this are a sobering reminder that the brain and its afflictions remain deeply mysterious. Despite the billions of dollars poured into depression research, we still don’t understand the causal mechanisms of the illness, which means we don’t even know which drug actions to screen for. We can’t even imitate our past successes. … So how does Prozac work? The sad answer is that we’re still not sure. And that means we don’t know how to come up with something better.
The Dish 