Hope Winner Believes Stone Age Strategies Can Remedy Modern Depression

There he worked in a unit that housed—or “warehoused,” as he puts it—patients with schizophrenia. Many had been abandoned by their families and faced the prospect of spending their lives in mental health institutions. It struck him: “These were people just like me in nearly every way, except for the fact that they were suffering from this tragic disease,” Ilardi recalls. “They could get lonely just like anyone else; they could suffer. They could connect, but they didn’t have that option.” Their isolation haunted Ilardi. He started hanging out with patients for hours each week, playing cards, talking politics, befriending them. The interaction fulfilled his need to reach out, but it also piqued his curiosity. “I got hooked from a scientific angle,” he explains. “I kept wondering, ‘What the hell is going on with these patients? What’s happening at a biological level?’” Soon Ilardi enrolled in night school. Then, at 27, with only three psychology classes on his college transcript, he applied to clinical psychology graduate programs. Ilardi landed at Duke, where he was drawn to depression-treatment research. After a postdoctoral position at the University of Colorado, Ilardi joined the KU faculty in 1997, ready to defend the world from depression. HOPE WINNER