A Rhetorical Analysis Of The TED Talk By Rebecca Branchman

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Rebecca Branchman is in the field of psychopharmacology, and works on developing stress resilience medication. In 2017 she gave a speech about a new groundbreaking drug that could help not only suppress symptoms, but prevent depression and posttraumatic stress disorder. In the TED talk Rebecca Branchman confidently speaks about a groundbreaking pharmaceutical discovery for mental health with a very obvious passion. Rebecca Branchman opens her speech with a shocking fact of how antidepressants were first made. Learning that leftover rocket fuel from World War Two was used to make antidepressants was sure to capture the audience's attention, especially due to the fact that it is estimated that 280 million people worldwide experience depression. …show more content…

Such as a stressful test, or a breakup.She then goes on to talk deeper into how stress resilience helps people bounce back after a stressful situation and how needed these are. The stress resilience was originally found in rats, so they are testing different amounts of stress hormones along with the standard antidepressant drug. She then uses a visual aid that shows the rats with added amounts of stress hormones and their depressive symptoms, compared to rats on the standard antidepressants, which had no change. Then she showed the rats depressive symptoms with the added amounts of stress hormones and added stress resilience, which was drastically lower than the other charts. She shares how this new discovery isn't just for those already experiencing symptoms of depression or PTSD, but could help people who are at a higher risk of having severe stress in their lives could avoid developing these symptoms with added stress resilience. Rebecca Branchman’s speech was put into simple terms for everyone in the audience to understand no matter what their knowledge was on her topic, with the help of those visual aids anyone could understand how important this discovery