From Forbes
by Bruce Upbin
Forty percent of Palestinians are clinically depressed, a rate unmatched anywhere in the word. It’s more than triple that of the U.S., ten times higher than in the U.K., and four to eight times higher than in Scandinavia, where the sun doesn’t shine for a good part of the year. For Palestinian neuroscientist Mohammad Herzallah, this epidemic is an opportunity, if a tragic one, because it has made his country an ideal place to do groundbreaking research into the effects of depression on the brain.
I caught up with the 27-year-old doctor at the TED Conference in Long Beach, Calif. this week. Herzallah grew up in Palestine and got his medical degree at Al-Quds University in the West Bank, just a 15-minute walk from Jerusalem but a two-hour drive once through the checkpoints. Currently a Ph.D. candidate at Rutgers University in Newark, Herzallah was awarded a coveted TED Fellowship this year for his efforts to set up the first infrastructure for neuroscience research in one of the poorest countries in the Middle East. His Palestinian Neuroscience Initiative opened its lab three and a half years ago at Al-Quds and now has 22 students, 14 medical specialists and four therapists. It has established partnerships with medical centers at Rutgers, Harvard, the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland and SISSA in Trieste, Italy.
“It’s a tragic fact but Palestine is an ideal place for depression research because of its young population, for whom the impact is much worse than on old people, and genetic homogeneity, which allows us to isolate other factors. These people have been living here continuously for a hundred thousand years,” says Herzallah. “Let’s turn the problem into an advantage and train the next generation to deal with it.”
