Not only has the pandemic aided a spike in mental health concerns, but the findings proved that the increase is actually worse than other large-scale traumatic events like catastrophic weather or terror attacks.

At a time when mental health conditions like depression remain stigmatised across cultures—with people often spending years just to land crucial appointments for diagnosis and treatments—scientists at the Indiana University School of Medicine have developed a coveted tool, claimed to be psychiatry’s “first-ever biological answer to diagnosing a mood disorder.”.

The study, as noted by Al Jazeera, delves into the biological basis of mental health concerns by developing a blood test using ribonucleic acid (RNA) markers that help distinguish the type of condition a person has.

Drawing on 15 years of previous research into how psychiatry relates to blood gene expression biomarkers, the team—led by Doctor Alexander Niculescu—has proved that it’s possible to diagnose depression and bipolar disorder with a blood test.

The blood test has clinical utility, is able to distinguish between the two conditions and can eventually match people to the right medications.

So how exactly can a blood test diagnose a mental health concern.

“For example, when you’re stressed or depressed, there are psycho-neurological mechanisms, hormones and other things that are released that affect your blood and your immune system,” Doctor Niculescu explained, adding how an immune activation or inflammation would therefore affect the brain.

The blood tests developed by Doctor Niculescu and his team are currently available as Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA)—a set of US government standards for laboratories that test human specimens for health assessment or to diagnose, prevent, or treat disease—for physicians to order.

Nevertheless, innovations like Doctor Niculescu’s blood test can undoubtedly transform early diagnosis of mental health concerns altogether.

According to Doctor Sonia Kumar, a Sydney-based psychiatrist, such objective tests are a game changer especially for conditions like bipolar disorder which first manifests itself as depression with the full array of manic symptoms taking years to appear and evolve over the years.

“If there were a biological test that could clarify these variables along with clinical assessment, clinicians could start accurate treatment earlier—which could mitigate a lot of suffering before it even happens,” Doctor Kumar told Al Jazeera.

With the ‘you’re just sad, sleep it off’ stigma still attached to mental health conditions like depression, the study led by Doctor Niculescu harbours the potential of playing a significant part in the psychiatric toolkit for diagnostics.

This, in turn, makes such innovations a necessary step to reach a horizon where we don’t have to bank on scientific test results to ‘validate’ our mental health concerns.

And even if it can be, Sarah’s treatment took a lot of resources and time to calibrate—efforts that will make it hard right now for this technology to become widely used by patients with depression