Find Something that Fascinates You Posted on May 2, 2006 Wayne Drevets (bio) talks about how he chose bipolar disorder as a career.

I think that one of the most important issues in picking a scientific career is to select a research topic that you find fascinating and interesting and that you have some commitment for that is sufficient to keep you up at night prior to grant deadlines and things of that nature so that it gives you the drive to keep going.

And, in my case, that came because of having developed some close friendships during high school and college with some individuals, who suffered from depression and also from bipolar disorder and seeing the devastation it created in their lives, but also developing a fascination for what it was that was causing these mood changes.

And in medical school, when I had my psychiatry clerkship, that fascination came back and so it became the one specialty area that really caught my fascination sufficiently enough that I then wanted to devote a career to that.

And during medical school, I learned about functional brain imaging, especially with positron emission tomography, and that was something that was just becoming available, but I viewed neuroimaging as a technology that could help define pathophysiology of psychiatric illnesses and that would help then catch psychiatry up as a field, where it would become more like an internal medicine of the brain.

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