According to the National Institute of Mental Health, about 2.5 million Americans -- or about 1 percent of the population -- struggles with schizophrenia, and the majority of them are diagnosed well into adulthood. The Alzheimer's Association reports that more than 5 million Americans currently struggle with that disease, and every 72 seconds another diagnosis is made. Depression afflicts untold numbers, and has become an epidemic in our modern world.

Treating each of these diseases has been an arduous effort with very little reward, populated with vain attempts to finally solve the riddle of why our minds sometimes fail us.

But in 2006, that started to change when Darryle D. Schoepp, a leading psychopharmocologist with Merck & Co., helmed the research into a revolutionary way of treating schizophrenia. Dr. Schoepp and his colleagues at Eli Lilly & Company -- where he began the research -- started with the theory that prior treatments, which focus on blocking the neurotransmitter dopamine, were misguided and instead focused on glutamate.

Also a powerful neurotransmitter, glutamate ties together the brain's most complex circuits. According to the New York Times, focusing on glutamate instead of dopamine as a possible cure began back in the 1980s, when PCP was found to block glutamate in its users' brains. Because PCP induced schizophrenia-like symptoms, the discovery was seminal but pharmaceutical research moves at a snail's pace.

After years of experimentation, a viable drug was produced that could be used to treat not just schizophrenia but also Alzheimer's and depression, and possibly several other mental illnesses. Since then, competing pharmaceutical firms have begun developing their own drugs, suggesting that Dr. Schoepp and his team were indeed barking up the right tree all along. But the work is not complete, and it could be up to three years before we see these medications on the market.

As someone who watched his grandmother slowly deteriorate from Alzheimer's, and his friend Jake's downward spiral into schizophrenia when he was just 17, I am hopeful that this research will bear fruit.