Sarah, a 36-year-old woman living in California, had lived with chronic depression for five years. She felt suicidal multiple times an hour and was unable to make decisions about basic questions like what to eat. Nothing she had tried to treat it, including electroconvulsive therapy, had helped.
Then, in June 2020, she had an implant inserted into her skull that zaps the parts of her brain that cause her illness. The remarkable results, published in Nature Medicine [October 4], raise the prospect of personalized treatments for people with severe mental illnesses that don’t respond to therapy or medication.
“My depression has been kept at bay, and that’s allowed me to start rebuilding a life that’s worth living,” Sarah said.
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Sarah (pictured above) can’t feel these electricity bursts, which is just as well, since they go off up to 300 times a day; each lasts for six seconds…. Before the device was implanted, Sarah had a score of 36 out of 54 on the Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale, a scoring system commonly used to rate the severity of these symptoms. After two weeks, her score fell to 14. Now it is under 10.
