You could say he was raised to do this work. When Omar was born, his father, who once taught English literature and now manages student textbooks for the Ministry of Education, started an apiary in the valley west of Rantis. The family came to raise more and more bees, selling their honey to pay for Omar’s education. He graduated and opened his clinic, committing himself to the long hours of caring for his people. Today, he says, "I want to go back and repay them what they paid me. Because they spent a lot of money and effort on things for getting me education. So it’s a kind of payback."

Omar wants to pay back his parents not only by becoming the village doctor, but in another way, one almost completely foreign to Palestine. He’s among a group of students and researchers who’ve formed the Palestinian Neuroscience Initiative, hoping to kickstart sophisticated scientific research in an area with only the most basic medical infrastructure, and where specialization — in narrow but vital areas including pediatric cardiology, but also broader fields such as neurology and psychiatry — is almost completely absent.

Even among typically ambitious medical students, the idea of establishing a foundation for original neuroscience research in Palestine seemed daunting. The students were too busy or simply uninterested in clinical research; there were few qualified teachers; there was little equipment, or money to buy any. What there was in abundance was skepticism.

That was four years ago. Today the Initiative has more than 20 students doing original research, and partnerships with scientists from Rutgers University–Newark, Harvard University, Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and the International School for Advanced Studies in Italy. It has produced four published papers; four more are currently under review. Last September, it received a National Institutes of Health grant, considered among the most prestigious in the field, a marker of serious, professional work. It’s making the kind of steady progress necessary to build an institution.

But most importantly to Omar and his colleagues, it’s giving them an opportunity to help. To give back.

Building a foundation

On a sunny summer afternoon, Omar walks through a door with a computer-printed piece of paper taped to the outside. "Al-Quds Cognitive Neuroscience Lab," it reads, and the door opens into a rectangular, white-walled classroom dominated by a long wooden table. Just over a dozen students are seated around it. The women sit on the left, nearly all wearing hijabs, and the men sit on the right.

At the head of the table, umbilicalled to the wall by a long extension cord, sits a MacBook. On-screen, the slightly pixelated face of Mohammad Herzallah leads the day’s discussion, shifting black squares representing his curly hair. His voice, originating almost 6,000 miles away, in Newark, New Jersey, asks about the role of the hippocampus in treating depression. An extended answer follows about the workings of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, a popular class of antidepressant drugs that includes Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil.

Or rather, "popular" in the United States. According to the World Health Organization, 19.2 percent of US adults surveyed experienced a major depressive episode in their lives; the Centers for Disease Control found that about one in every 10 Americans aged 12 and over takes antidepressants, including SSRIs. As both diagnoses of depression and use of antidepressants rose in the US, "Prozac" became a household name. More than just a drug, it has become a cultural signifier for debates about mental illness and its proffered cures.

Depression in the West Bank is at 36 percent — nearly double that of the US

In Palestine, by contrast, television does not air commercials for antidepressants, nor do magazines feature full-page, pastel-colored ads suggesting you ask your doctor if a particular pill is right for you. Depression itself remains stigmatized. "People don’t want to speak about it, people don’t want to mention it, people don’t even want to speak about family members who have it," says Herzallah, co-founder and director of the Palestinian Neuroscience Initiative. Depressed patients often don’t seek medical attention; if they do, they often couch their ailment in physical terms, complaining about, for example, lower back pain. And they try hard not to be seen leaving a mental health clinic.

Beneath the collective reticence, Palestine has a problem. According to one published study, 25 percent of Palestinians will experience a major depressive episode in their lifetimes. Herzallah believes data gathered by the Initiative indicates that rate in the West Bank is closer to 36 percent — or nearly double that of the US. Yet, as Herzallah puts it, "We have about 20 psychiatrists and 14 neurologists to serve 2.8 million inhabitants of the West Bank in Palestine."