VANCOUVER — Rebecca Brachman sat at a table in a quiet area of the convention center Monday evening when a man approached her.
‘‘Your talk inspired me,’’ he told her. “I was really fascinated. I just wanted you to know that.’’
This happened throughout the day at the TED2017 conference as Brachman adopted mini-celebrity status after she stood on stage here and told the audience she may have discovered a drug that could prevent mental illness. Since then, it was hard for her to navigate the halls without someone stopping her to commend her work.
For the 34-year-old neuroscientist at Columbia University, the positive reception to her research was surprising, yet she realized it shouldn’t be, given the statistics. If 1 in 5 people has a diagnosable mental health condition in a given year, then it’s likely that most people in the room had direct experience with some kind of psychological disorder, either personally or in someone they knew. And given that the World Health Organization recently named depression the leading cause of disability globally, a scientist advancing preventive medicine should be treated with rock star status.
In 2014, Brachman was studying emotional behaviors in mice when she accidentally stumbled upon what could be one of the biggest breakthroughs in mental health pharmacology. She had given some mice the drug ketamine, also known as “special K,’’ which has been tried as an antidepressant. Because the drug was known to wear off in a few hours and funds were tight, she ended up using some of the same mice for another study testing mice’s resilience under chronic stress conditions.
The mice that had previously taken the drug were completely inoculated from the types of depressive, withdrawn symptoms they typically exhibited after being put through several weeks of major stress-inducing scenarios. She ran it again and again, and discovered that the ketamine seemed to enhance stress resilience enough to ward off triggers that often hurt their mental health.
If it works in humans, she envisions the drug she’s developing could be used to give to soldiers in war or aid workers in disaster zones to manage their emotions in the aftermath. She’s not trying to ‘‘to make super soldiers without empathy,’’ she said in an interview after her talk, but instead prevent the onset of future depression or anxiety all too common among those who experience and witness trauma.
Brachman, at the precipice of what could be one of the biggest discoveries in mental health since antidepressants were developed in the 1950s, was among two dozen TED Fellows chosen to present at the annual conference.
She said she hopes sharing her research not only drives interest, but also adds to the growing conversation around destigmatizing mental health. It’s only when society takes it as seriously as physical health that real progress will be made, she said.
Brachman plans to begin testing the drug on humans next year.
‘‘How quickly we get any of these treatments will depend on how as a society we prioritize it,’’ she said.
