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No medications had worked; the depression wouldn't lift. "After
this year of absolute hell for David," Sally says, "they decided to
go back to the Nardil." The doctors also administered 12 courses of
electroconvulsive therapy, waiting for Wallace's medication to
become effective. "Twelve," Sally repeats. "Such brutal
treatments," Jim says. "It was clear then things were bad."

Wallace and his parents would get up at six in the morning and
walk the dogs. They watched DVDs of The Wire, talked.
Sally cooked David's favorite dishes, heavy comfort foods —
pot pies, casseroles, strawberries in cream. "We kept telling him
we were so glad he was alive," his mother recalls. "But my feeling
is that, even then, he was leaving the planet. He just couldn't
take it."

One afternoon before they left, David was very upset. His mother
sat on the floor beside him. "I just rubbed his arm. He said he was
glad I was his mom. I told him it was an honor."

what is particularly striking is the almost comical extent to which fans appropriate the successes and failures of their team. Like a stadium full of stage moms, they see the accomplishments of their team as reflections of themselves.

win or lose, rooting for a team has its benefits. Work by Daniel Wann, a psychologist at Murray State, has found that fans of a local team tend to be happier than nonfans (and happier, too, than fans of non-local teams) - less prone to depression, anger, and stress.

The reason, he argues, is simple: being a fan automatically places a person in a community, giving him people to talk to, something to talk to them about, and events at which to do it. The bond can be a first step toward a deeper friendship, or it can simply lend a comforting sense of belonging

Much of the research on the topic has focused on the bad company it tends to keep, from depression and overeating to smoking and drug use.

Yet boredom is more than a mere flagging of interest or a precursor to mischief. Some experts say that people tune things out for good reasons, and that over time boredom becomes a tool for sorting information — an increasingly sensitive spam filter. In various fields including neuroscience and education, research suggests that falling into a numbed trance allows the brain to recast the outside world in ways that can be productive and creative at least as often as they are disruptive.

Genes are defined on the neurobiological level, while psychiatric diagnoses are defined on the phenomenological level - in other words, verbal descriptions of behaviour, or verbal descriptions of what it is like to have certain mental states.

There is no guarantee, and in many people's opinion, probably no likelihood, that these 'what it is like' descriptions actually clearly demarcate distinct processes at the biological level.

Duman's lab has demonstrated, in a paper published earlier this year, that physical exercise seems to stimulate the same regenerative pathways. Mice given access to running wheels not only showed reduced anxiety and stress, but also increased levels of the same trophic factors activated by antidepressants. When the activity of these trophic factors was blocked, the benefits of exercise disappeared. The mice stayed stressed, even when they were allowed to run on their wheel.

It is jarring to think of depression in terms of atrophied brain cells, rather than an altered emotional state. It is called "depression," after all. Yet these scientists argue that the name conceals the fundamental nature of the illness, in which the building blocks of the brain - neurons - start to crumble. This leads, over time, to the shrinking of certain brain structures, like the hippocampus, which the brain needs to function normally.

In fact, many scientists are now paying increased attention to the frequently neglected symptoms of people suffering from depression, which include problems with learning and memory and sensory deficits for smell and taste. Other researchers are studying the ways in which depression interferes with basic bodily processes, such as sleeping, sex drive, and weight control. Like the paralyzing sadness, which remains the most obvious manifestation of the mental illness, these symptoms are also byproducts of a brain that's literally withering away.

People who are inept at understanding their feelings and those who become sucked in and distracted by their moods are more easily bored, for example.

Staving off tedium is no mundane matter. People who are predisposed to boredom are more likely to suffer from ills such as depression and drug addiction; they also tend to be socially awkward and poor performers at school or work

alexithymia—a deficiency in understanding and describing your own feelings, accompanied by an inhibited emotional and fantasy life—also scored higher on the BPS.