Roughly 20 million people suffer from depression in the united states. for about 10 percent of them, nothing in psychiatry’s standard arsenal offers relief, not the extensive repertoire of drugs, not cognitive therapy, not even electroconvulsive treatments (what used to be called shock therapy). Their disease is life-threatening, with a high risk of suicide. Emory University neurologist Helen Mayberg has pioneered a startling way to help people suffering from this devastating form of depression, by literally getting inside their heads. The treatment, known as deep brain stimulation (DBS), involves drilling into a patient’s skull and inserting very thin wires that deliver current to precisely targeted brain regions.
Deep brain stimulation is still experimental; it has been deployed in fewer than a hundred severely depressed patients. But in some cases, it has resulted in an almost instantaneous transformation. Mayberg, professor of psychiatry and neurology and Dorothy C. Fuqua Chair in Psychiatric ...
