Jonathan Rottenberg

Background

About Jonathan Rottenberg

I'm a professor of psychology at Cornell University, where I direct the Better Outcomes Laboratory. It is well-known that depression often has a destructive impact on individuals and society. Less well-understood are cases where depression has a benign outcome. My lab has been studying good long-term outcomes in depression and related mental health conditions. In representative national samples in the US and Canada, finding that a substantial number of people with significant mental health problems go on to experience high-levels of psychological well-being. Our long-term goals are (1) to explain why some people experience these good outcomes and (2) to find ways to increase the number of people who experience these good outcomes, including interventions that incorporate these insights. My work has been generously funded by the National Institutes of Health. I enjoy disseminating science to the public and my work has been covered extensively in outlets such as Scientific American, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and Time. I have written two popular science books: “The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic (Basic Books)" and "Depression: What Everyone Needs to Know "(Oxford). My latest education project is Ever After, a video series about life after depression.