Depression, antidepressants, and the shrinking hippocampus

Throughout human history, it has been apparent that few medical maladies are as devastating in their effects as major depression. And since the 1950s, with the advent of the first generation of antidepressants, it has been apparent that depression is a biological disorder. This has generated the tremendous intellectual challenge of how to understand the material, reductive bases of a disease of malignant sadness.