In 2011, the organization rebranded itself, becoming the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation to help better explain the breadth of research funding we cover beyond schizophrenia and depression.

Started by a small group of people with loved ones living with mental illness determined to increase the pace of research to find the causes, better treatments and cures for mental illnesses.

Dr. Zarate and colleagues gave a single dose of ketamine to 36 treatment-resistant patients with bipolar disorder. The drug, experimental in this application, worked remarkably well, reducing anhedonia —feelings of apathy and inability to enjoy oneself—within 40 minutes. The effect lasted up to two weeks and did not correlate with the status of other depressive symptoms. There is no approved treatment for anhedonia, which is also common in schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease, drug addiction and mood and anxiety disorders.

In 2013, NARSAD Grantee Kirsty Spalding, Ph.D., and team at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, used an innovative methodology to identify the “birth date” of neurons in deceased human brains. They found a way to “carbon date” neurons by testing brain specimens from deceased adult humans who lived through the middle of the last century, during a period of above-ground nuclear bomb testing and elevated atmospheric levels of carbon-14. The researchers were able to quantify the amount of carbon-14 stamped into DNA when a new neuron is born, essentially “carbon dating” the neurons.