Abstract
Depression requires a long time for remission and recovery, and is the representative disease that causes a lot of social and financial loss. In the clinical settings, objective indices that are useful for diagnosis or the evaluation of therapeutic effectiveness are not available, and not a few non‐remission or treatment‐resistant cases exist. Therefore, it is crucial to elucidate the neural substrate of depression in the biological research of neuropsychiatry. One of the brain regions that has been drawing attention is the habenula. The habenula is assumed to be involved in the anti‐reward system as the hub adjusting the monoamine system. In recent years, it is possible to evaluate the human habenula thanks to the improvement of hardware and software in non‐invasive imaging techniques. This paper would describe the findings of the habenula in depression mainly from the human brain research.
No potential conflicts of interest were disclosed.
