clipped from: news.yahoo.com 
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The brain can produce antidepressants with the right signal, a finding that suggests that meditating, or going to your "happy place," truly works, scientists reported on Wednesday.
Mice forced to swim endlessly until they surrendered and just floated, waiting to drown, could be conditioned to regain their will to live when a tone they associated with safety was played.
The experiment suggests that there are good ways to teach people this skill, and points to new routes for developing better antidepressants, said Dr. Eric Kandel of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Columbia University in New York, who led the research.
"The happy place works. This is like going to the country," Kandel said in a telephone interview.
This shows how effective psychotherapy, meditation and other stress-reduction tools may be, and it could help in the design of new drugs, Kandel said.