Her Depression Was Untreatable — Until Two Electrodes Were Implanted in Her Brain

How researchers are changing the brain’s messaging system to tackle mental health disorders

Credit: Pixabay

There’s a disturbingly long list of ways in which the brain can go wrong. I might name for you a sample of mental health conditions: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, clinical depression, anxiety disorders of all kinds, obsessive compulsive disorder. Even just the list of movement disorders is miserably long: Parkinson’s disease and all its many related forms, Huntington’s disease, dystonia, Tourette’s syndrome. I would continue, but it’s all, well, depressing.

The lists are complex because your brain is complex. There are myriad ways for it to malfunction. And, because of this, each one of those disorders has linked to it myriad causes, from mutations in genes, through misfolded, clumped proteins, to the death of brain cells.

So when we want to treat a disorder, how do we know what to go after? What should we target, and how do we fix it? A stunning new breakthrough in treating depression shows one compelling answer: we go after how the brain’s neurons talk to each other.

In a new paper in Nature Medicine, Katherine Scangos and colleagues report…