The Walrus Magazine published a lengthy article entitled “Mapping the Blues” that promotes brain scanning called Positron Emission Tomography, or PET scan, which is really a 3-dimensional nuclear medicine medical imaging technique. In this article it’s used as a “solution” for a medical test to find depression in the brain of the patient. The article highlights the work of Dr. Helen Mayberg, a neuropsychiatrist at Emory University in Atlanta. She said, “The problem of mental illness fascinated me, but the process of diagnosing and treating mental-health problems was fuzzy. I felt that something important was missing. Neurology is very unfuzzy; I liked the order and objectivity of it. There were rules you could apply. In psychiatry, certain rules might seem to apply, but there wasn’t a known map of the brain to guide you. Psychiatry didn’t have an evidence-based playbook.” The article uses past psych failures as a springboard to this “new” methods of diagnosing depression: “In the 1930s, electro-convulsive therapy was introduced as a treatment for severe depression. Crude methods and abuses produced bone fractures, memory loss, and severe brain damage in some patients. In 1936 Dr. Egas Moniz, a Portuguese neurosurgeon, invented the frontal lobotomy, a procedure in which he used a special wire knife to sever white fibres connecting the frontal lobes to the rest of the brain. An American neurologist modified this into a quicker, cruder, and more gruesome procedure, known as the “ice-pick” lobotomy. Frontal lobotomies resulted in zombie-like patients. In the 1940s and 1950s more than 50,000 Americans with mental illness were subjected to lobotomies, with no solid evidence of any benefits. The 1950s saw a revolution in the biological treatment of depression with the introduction of the first effective antidepressant drugs.

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