Professor Ed Bullmore on the link between inflammation and depression

"None of us will live our lives untouched by depression, directly or indirectly. By 2030, depression is expected to be the single biggest cause of disability in the world."

At any one time, one in ten people in the world are depressed, while 25 percent of us will suffer from depression in our lifetimes. That’s at least one member of every family on the planet.

None of us will live our lives untouched by depression, directly or indirectly. By 2030, depression is expected to be the single biggest cause of disability in the world. Worldwide, mental health disorders account for economic costs in the order of three percent of GDP.

In 1641, Descartes established his system of dualism, dividing our conscious minds from our physical bodies. Our brains think, our bodies do. We ended up with what I’ve termed "medical apartheid" — complete segregation of the body from the mind, and a medical profession where psychiatrists only treat the mind, and physicians only treat the body.

For centuries, this polarised view of the mind and body has stopped us from preventing the current epidemic of mental illness. In psychiatry, time has stood still. The treatments we have for depression today are the same as those when I commenced my training as a psychiatrist 30 years ago.

We now know that inflammatory proteins in the blood can send signals across from the body to the brain and the mind. This opens a whole new area of cause and treatment we can investigate. We are on the cusp of revolutionary discoveries that could help prevent and treat mental conditions from Alzheimer’s to addiction.

At Cambridge, we’re establishing the Institute for Brain and Mind Health, a centre of innovation that will bring psychiatrists, neuroscientists and immunologists together: a place where young doctors and scientists will learn to examine not parts, but the whole.

Without medical apartheid, neuroscientists can be immunologists, and without boundaries between the body and the mind, psychiatrists can be physicians. At the Brain and Mind Institute, Cambridge doctors and scientists will look at mental illnesses through a new lens: one which allows us to see both brain and the body as part of one human being. It will allow us to find the answers to some of this century’s most intractable problems.