SAN ANTONIO – A UTSA student is researching treatment for depression after it touched her own family. In 2017, her father committed suicide.
“He had been depressed for a couple of months, so I pretty much knew at that point,” student Lynee Massey said.
Massey said he suffered from bipolar disorder and was taking medicine.
“While I was a student here, nothing could really help him, and I was already studying chemistry at this point because of him,” Massey said. “A lot of people that are prescribed antidepressants, they stop working or they never work for them. Antidepressants right now are hit or miss.”
Massey continued working hard, keeping her father’s memory close.
“I wrote a proposal, which I thankfully got for grad school, and the proposal was psychedelic drugs are a model for a new type of antidepressants and synthesizing and testing more,” Massey said.
Massey worked on three different projects developing new chemical reactions and spent a summer in Berkley.
Massey starts grad school in the fall and wants to honor her father the best way she knows how.
“People that are sick that have no hope, there’s no medicine that can help me, I want to be part of a team that makes those medicines,” Massey said.
Massey will attend grad school at Scripps Research Institute in California. She received a grant from the National Science Foundation.