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A small clinical trial identified an anti-inflammatory drug that alleviates depression.

Rethinking the causes of depression expands treatment options for patients.

Everyone gets depressed from time to time. Think about those unpleasant days when you’re sick. You feel depleted and unsociable. You lose interest in everything. You just want to crawl under the covers and rest alone.

Scientists call this “sickness behavior” and believe it evolved because it comes with benefits. Someone who isolates themselves from others is less likely to transmit their illness. A tired individual who loses interest in activities is diverting energy to fighting off a virus, or to healing.

But for about 332 million people worldwide, the depressive behavior usually reserved for recovering from an illness or injury never lets up, like a dark cloud that won’t vacate the sky. It raises an intriguing question: Could depression, or at least some instances of it, arise when the immune system doesn’t know when to quit?

Depression and the monoamine hypothesis

The cause of depression has long been mysterious, but astute medical observations in the 1950s suggested that moods are influenced by chemicals coursing through our brains. Doctors noticed that some patients taking a drug called reserpine for high blood pressure developed depressive symptoms. Conversely, tuberculosis patients taking a newly discovered antibiotic called iproniazid reported feelings of euphoria.

A decade later, the “monoamine hypothesis” was........

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