Tulsa World: Depression treatment takes new approach

WOW! I have a question. I am going to spend more time thinking about this but for now I just want to throw up a quick question I've had for a while.

If I was an introspective person, which I am, and looked around this world I would find a lot of things that depressed me. If I was a kind of fix-it man, which I am, that focused on problems in an attempt to figure out what caused them with intentions of fixing them, I would tend to go deeper into empathetic depression.

In the end, or along the way I would find there is not much I can do to solve these problems and that would depress me even more. Now at this point I would expect that that my brain-chemical balances would indicate that I need some adjusting of sorts. Do I now quit being concerned and give up, knowing that there may be a solution just around the bend?

When I look around at the greatest, most advanced, and wealthy country in the history of mankind and see all the despair, injustice, torture, and meanness occurring with our children, from a total lack of structure and guidance from our adults, I think that if I am not depressed, then I WOULD need some form of medication.

From the linked article:

In the 1990s, Mayberg identified a segment of the brain that appeared to be responsible for depression. Called Brodmann Area 25, she noticed that it was metabolically overactive among people who suffered severe depression. She hypothesized that deep-brain stimulation that has been used for Parkinson's disease sufferers might help recalibrate that part of the brain and provide relief for depression sufferers who didn't respond to medication, psychotherapy or shock therapy.

Mayberg's findings stunned the research community in 2005 when she published results showing that deep-brain stimulation was effective for most of her patients in the trial. "The hypothesis was if you have depression circuits in the brain, you can tune it to recovery," she said.

"We had a hypothesis, and we tried it." Patients have electrodes surgically implanted in their brain while they are awake, then later wear a battery pack that delivers carefully controlled impulses to specific brain segments, Mayberg said. "The patients were very, very ill, and 60 percent got better," she said. "It's like a pacemaker for the brain."

Seven years out, some of those patients continue to do well with the deep-brain stimulation, she said.

That study was based upon 20 patients, but now a large random double-blind clinical trial is set to further test the treatment.

This is encouraging; it will be interesting to see how a larger trial turns out.

Hi Bonnie,

Thanks for responding, I’m working on mainstreaming now and hopeful.