New understanding helps lift depression

Treating depression with hormones or with magnetic stimulation to the brain are two effective and innovative approaches to this debilitating condition that have resulted from a successful combination of university research and clinical practice.

The Monash Alfred Psychiatry research centre (MAPrc) has generated beneficial treatments for people who have failed to find relief in standard treatments, said Professor Jayashri Kulkarni, the centre’s director.

“We are seeing some spectacular turnarounds for people who have been virtually moribund with depression,” Professor Kulkarni said.

Professor Kulkarni and her team at MAPrc combine the research expertise of Monash University and the clinical setting of The Alfred hospital.

“We are in the privileged position of being able to draw on the university resources and the background of basic science, but we are also part of a hospital, and in psychiatry I think that’s vital. We can offer new treatments, new services along with a new understanding of conditions,” Professor Kulkarni said.

MAPrc receives referrals from across Australia and around the world for patients who have not responded to conventional treatments. Statistics show that in Australia one million people – almost one in 20 – suffer from a mental illness that does not respond to traditional treatments such as antidepressants or electroconvulsive therapy.

Professor Kulkarni leads the Women’s Mental Health Clinic at MAPrc, where world-leading work has led to several breakthroughs in treating mental illness, using hormones and especially the potent brain steroid oestrogen.

MAPrc deputy director Professor Paul Fitzgerald heads the centre’s psychiatric neurotechnology stream, which works on a non-drug treatment for depression that is being adopted internationally.

It involves stimulation of neural pathways with transcranial magnetic stimulation, and has proved highly effective even for people who have been suffering from depression for decades. Research is now under way to investigate its potential to help people suffering from schizophrenia and autism.

Read the full story of the innovative work being done at the Monash Alfred Psychiatry research centre in “New pathways to old selves” in Monash: Delivering Impact.

(Source: MONASH University)