The Psychic Energizer!: The Serendipitous Discovery of the First Antidepressant

The early twentieth century was a period of frenetic drug development, a seemingly endless series of pharmaceutical and medical discoveries: antibiotics to treat bacterial infections, chemotherapeutics to battle cancers, and barbiturates to tranquilize anxieties, among many others. A huge number of these revolutionary medical treatments were discovered in the first half of the 1950s, an unprecedented era of advances in chemistry yielding a pharmacopoeia that would transform disease and the practice of medicine.One of the drugs developed during these years altered medicine’s approach to not just one debilitating disease, but two. A drug designed to kill the bacteria that causes tuberculosis was serendipitously found to improve mood and invoke joy, a discovery that would profoundly impact psychiatry’s approach to the treatment of depression. This drug, iproniazid, would become the world's first antidepressant, launching an era of rapid development of psychoactive drugs while simultaneously moving the field of psychiatry away from the treatment du jour: electroconvulsive therapy.Iproniazid is a derivative - a great-grandson if you will - of the hydrazine compounds that were discovered in the late 1800s. Hydrazine is most notable for fueling Nazi V2 rockets during WWII, but following the end of the war, the enormous remaining stockpiles of the stuff were cheaply sold to the chemical and pharmaceutical industries for research (1).