Treating mental illness with electricity marries old ideas with modern tech and understanding of the brain

There are a lot of people struggling with mental illnesses like OCD,addiction,anxiety or depression which don’t respond to drugs and are hard to get rid of. But there’s a new,promising method of treating this diseases which involves stimulating the brain with electicity.

 We often hear ppl joke that their ocd makes them do strange things fe.straighten a crooked picture. But for people living with this disease the reality is anything but funny.

A physician and professor at the University of Colorado - Moksha Patel talks about how OCD had taken over his life. After years of fighting with this sickness he decided to get in touch with a psychiatrist and researcher-Rachel Davis who said that he would be the perfect candidate for deep brain stimulation as a cure for his ocd.


Davis explains that deep brain stimulation involves the implantation of electrodes in the deeper areas of the brain.Basically they’re looking to find the settings where the patient feels that their mood is improving,their anxiety is decreasing and they have more energy.

This method is the answer for a lot of patients and it got more attention in the past 10 years.

It all started with a Spanish neuroscientist - Jose Manuel Rodriguez Delgado in 1964.

This idea got him on the first pages of NY Times but also started a terrifying era of lobotomies,electroshock and a lot of other destructive,unethical treatments but they started to fall out when researchers discovered drugs.

So today scientists like Jacinta O’Shea are beginning to study a noninvasive technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation.


O’Shea explained that if you place a ferromagnetic coil on the scalp and pass a rapidly changing electrical current through that coil, it will induce an electric field that passes painlessly through the skull and into the brain tissue underneath. And exactly these electrical fields can help people overcome mental health issues like depression.


Source:https://theconversation.com/amp/treating-mental-illness-with-electricity-marries-old-ideas-with-modern-tech-and-understanding-of-the-brain-podcast-195071

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