Genetic "switch" of depression found

The social cost of depression is impressive: over 100 billion dollars for the 16% of population that every year is victim of this disease.

Now in the Yale University, New Haven (Connecticut), the research group leaded by prof. Duman, isolated this gene, MKP-1, which has the role to promote the depression symptoms in some lab mice when activated. The gene has been first noticed in a greater percentage in dead people to which depression has been diagnosed during their lives with respect to the gene-presence percentage of some healthy people used as controls. Then it has been isolated in mice and activated/deactivated in order to make experiments, and they found that the mice enacted depressive behaviors when the gene was activated. The paper has been published by Nature Medicine.

After reading the paper, I still have a question: how and by means of which mechanisms this "switch" is activated? Is there an event or a series of events which "activate" the gene?? I don't think that all the genetically predisposed people necessarily have to be depressed.

In sum, I guess that also the gene has to be somehow "activated" by something, in order to trigger depressive behaviors by means of the production of these "wrong" proteines, in turn influencing the serotonine reuptaking!!
Of course, the practical outcome of this direction of studies will be (hopefully) the production of a new series of medical drugs which will be able to target directly the gene, limitating the well known problem of those "treatment-resistant patients".

Personally, I'm still in the opinion that there are some top-down ways of de-activate the wrong functioning of the serotonine reuptake triggered by the gene, and that the only usage of pharmacological treatments is pretty useless, since when you stop assuming the medicine, your activated gene is producing the wrong stuff again (unless they don't find a way to definitively deactivate the gene in people's genetic code)...I guess that, if there are some external (or internal) events which "activate" the beginning of the wrong chain process, there is also a way to de-activate it...maybe finding the thing that started everything, or trying to find an alternative way to regulate the process bypassing the main problem, without the necessity to assume drugs.

Click on the link to see the original article: Scoperto “interruttore” genetico della depressione (articolo in italiano).