Lifting the Veil of Depression

Experimental Electrical Pulse Therapy Can Shift Moods, Possibly Cure Depression

By JOHN McKENZIE
May 29, 2008

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, more than 21 million Americans suffer from some kind of depressive disorder. For about 4 million of the most severe cases, no treatment can help. But there is a promising experimental therapy now in clinical trials that, in essence, "rewires" the brain. It is most definitely medicine on the cutting edge.

Diane Hire of Norwalk, Ohio, is 54 years old. For the past 20 years, she has lived with severe, unrelenting depression.

"You felt like a dead person walking. There was just nothing left in me," Hire told ABC News. "I had no emotion left. I had no energy left. I had nothing. I was an empty shell of a person."

She was prescribed one anti-depressant after another, as well as psychotherapy. Nothing worked. She tried to commit suicide three times.

"It was unbearable. It was just unbearable." she said. "You start to feel that your friends and family would be better off without you." Hire reasoned, "There's just not anything that's going to change. So why live like this?"

Finally, her psychiatrist suggested a radically different, experimental treatment: deep brain stimulation, the same procedure that's been used safely for two decades to calm the tremors of Parkinson's disease and is now being tested on severe depression.

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