Effectiveness of Medications on Affective Disorders

Krystle Chapple, Verrazzano Honors Class of 2023, completed major in Medical Laboratory Science, with minors in ASL, Biochemistry, and Psychology

My capstone idea began when I took a spring 2018 class, Cognitive Psychology, taught by Dr. Daniel Kaplin. It was interesting and informative, and was and still is one of my favorite classes.
The timing happened to be at a crossroads when my partner was dealing with depression. He had been given many medications, but none of them worked. He wasn’t the only one. Many people I knew who took antidepressants shared with me how ineffective they were. I thought that was interesting as this happened to be one of the topics in my class at the time, and something clicked for me after learning the material. I mentioned it to my professor who was very excited by my idea and urged me to explore it.
With his help, I did some digging and we found that this idea had merit. I came up with a possible reason why antidepressants are not effective for so many people and my professor suggested it might make for a good research review. I held onto that idea for years and I was so glad that I got to do it for my capstone.
I learned so much about what goes into writing a research review, which involves a lot of reading. I must have read well over one hundred research papers. As a consequence, I learned a lot more about the topic I was writing about. It was very exciting to find that after all of my reading, my idea still held up.
I think one of the most valuable things my mentor taught me was how to organize. There were so many papers and so much information. They gave me a base to work off of and I also developed my own methods for keeping all the information organized. I used an Excel spreadsheet to track my papers and did the citations right away so that at the end I didn't have to go crazy hunting and creating citations. This was the best decision I could have made. This paper had more citations than any paper I’ve ever written but it took me the least amount of time.
My experience writing this research review has been an invaluable experience. One thing I’ve taken away from CSI is that I enjoy research and I want to continue doing research in my career. This was a great step in teaching me what goes into writing formal academic papers for this field and the skills I’ve learned here will continue to serve me.