Severe Depression by Zapping the Brain
Chances are that you know somebody, perhaps a family member, friend, or acquaintance, who has had severe depression or at least some kind of depression before.
It’s a hugely prevalent mental disorder, with up to 17% of people in the US suffering from it at some point in their lives.
In a small subset of severe depression cases, even strong medication or electroconvulsive brain therapy don’t help.
To treat these patients, a group of psychiatrists and neurosurgeons in Mannheim and Heidelberg, Germany, have successfuly conducted an initial deep brain stimulation study.
Deep brain stimulation is a surgical procedure where a thin metal wire, an electrode, is implanted into a certain part of the brain to stimulate it. The electrode has to be placed in a very, very specific area (millimeters in size) of the brain and thus the patient’s head is fixed in place with a ‘stereotactic rig,’ which is a precisely machined device that can guide the electrode to a precise coordinate within the head.
The scientists in this most recent study implanted the electrode into the habenula, which is a small group of neurons that is thought to be involved in reward processing and many other functions. They found that habenular stimulation was able to successfuly treat a 64-year-old woman who had intractable, severe depression since the age of 18!