A Brain Pacemaker for Depression

Ranger writes "Scientists claim to have developed a pacemaker 'cure' for depression. It may also have applications to controlling tremor's in Parkison' sufferers. This sounds vaguely like Ren & Stimpy's Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy helmet from Stimpy's Invention."

Comments

"Make my day"

[Pig Hogger]

Sounds like a "Tasp", from Larry Niven "Known Space" novels.

(A Tasp is a device that lets one remotely tickle someone else's brain pleasure center. It's illegal, of course, since very often, the victim, after a moment of pure joy, is bound to get depressed and eventually becomes a wirehead, by having a wire to the pleasure center surgically implanted, then getting high on house current [presumably transformed down to a managable voltage/current] and avoiding normal sundry chores like working, washing-up and eventually eating).

Re:"Make my day"

[fm6]

Niven didn't actually invent the "tasp". Like a lot of his concepts, it was just regurgitated magazine articles and folklore. In this case, there was a story circulating that somebody had wired a lever into the "pleasure center" of a rat's brain. Another lever dispensed the rat's food supply. Supposedly, the rat was so caught up in pressing the pleasure lever, it never got around to pushing the food lever, and starved to death.

As usual, Niven did manage to turn this concept into interesting stories. Though (as usual) he also rather beat the idea to death. But the sad thing is that the whole concept is probably either an urban legend or a distortion of real research. I'm pretty sure there's no such thing as a "pleasure center". It is true that things directly induce pleasure in the brain also tend to override basic drives, such as hunger -- something every crack addict demonstrates.

Re:"Make my day"

[Mark_MF-WN]

There actually is such a thing. It's located in the limbic system, and is primarily affected by the release of dopamine (which is why drugs that stimulate the release of dopamine are so pleasurable). The rat story isn't apocryphal, although I'd feel better if I had a link to a journal it was published in.

Re:"Make my day"

[Harodotus]

IANAR(researcher), but for journal references how about:

From M.A. Bozarth (1994). Pleasure systems in the brain. In D.M. Warburton (ed.), Pleasure: The politics and the reality (pp. 5-14 + refs). New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Based on research from the origanal study:

Olds, J. and Milner, P.: Positive reinforcement produced by electrical stimulation of septal area and other regions of rat brain. J. Comp. Physiol. Psychol. 47: 419-427, 1954 [Medline pre1966 - no text online availble].

Re:"Make my day"

[Mark_MF-WN]

Which is? I'm unfamiliar with any model that doesn't involve identifying specific brain structures that perform certain groups of functions. If that wasn't a good model for the brain, brain surgery would be virtually impossible, as would most forms of brain-imaging.

But please, enlighten me. Can you point me in the direction of some new, superior model?

World

[Mark_MF-WN]

Didn't it ever occurr to anyone to just make the world less shitty? That would clear up most depression quite nicely.

Seriously though -- I've seen people with medication-resistant major depressive disorder, and it sucks real bad. Anything that can help these people is worth looking into.

Re:World

[fm6]

That's the usual misconception about clinical depression -- that it's just a fancy way of saying "unhappy". But to doctors it describes various syndromes where a person's mental function is "depressed". It means not just a bad mood, but an inability to feel a good mood. Or to think clearly, respond to events, and a lot of other inabilities.

Moving a person with such a condition onto another planet where everything's perfect might help them feel better. Or not. People with a built-in capacity for depression can get depressed -- even suicidal -- over things that most people wouldn't even notice.

Thing is, the word "depression" doesn't really explain anything. It's just a handy label for a wide variety of conditions, some fairly well understood, others hardly understood at all. So it ends up being a dumping bin for any condition with mostly psychological symptoms that a doctor can't explain through physical disease. So really depression is "diagnosed" only by elimination -- and it often happens that the doctor has not eliminated all other possibilities.

Re:World

[Mark_MF-WN]

Oh, I'm well aware of that. Hence the "seriously though".

Depression is definitely a nasty business. It's often extremely difficult treat (some people are virtually immune to the positive effects of psychotropic medications, although rarely to the negative ones). Psychotherapy is often unhelpful for intelligent and/or cynical people. It's a bad scene.

Re:World

[Shihar]

Actually, a neat theory I heard about depression is that it comes into existence because the world doesn't suck. The basic idea is this. In nature a human be under constant life and death adversity. You would always be hungry and always searching for food. Depression in such in instance would offer up a defense against a lack of food. If you ran out of food, you would become depressed, expend less energy, and spend your time worrying how to obtain more food. Hopefully, you would find more food and resume a normal life.

Fast forward to today. You are a 16 year old girl in America. You are never going to starve. Survival will never be an issue for you. You have a mechanism that is designed to deal with life and death situations, but there are none. Instead, it goes crazy. It picks something that has absolutely nothing to do with survival, like boys, school, grades, popularity, or whatever. Worse still, none of these problems are easily satisfied. You can find plentiful food and be totally full, but how do satisfy more abstract worries like relationships and school? These are problems that can never be totally solved.

That is one BS theory I heard anyways. I have also heard something similar about allergies. People's immune systems are used to looking for environmental containments in nature, but when you live in a sterile environment it goes nuts and over reacts.

Already exists...

[EnronHaliburton2004]

Such a device already exists, and is used by hundreds of thousands of geeks across the globe!

Bored at work. Bored at work. Getting depressed. Getting depressed.

Oh, new story on Slashdot! Yay! Something to do. Happy! Happy!

Ok. Read story. Not so good after all. Bored at work. Bored at work. Getting depressed. Getting depressed.

Oh, new story on Slashdot! Yay! Something to do. Happy! Happy!

I thought this looked familiar...

[SoCalChris]

A dupe from almost a year ago.

Violation of Inalienable Rights

[the eric conspiracy]

Hey - the basic catechism of life in America is that you have the right to pursue happiness. This implies that you cannot ever achieve it because then you would lose the ability to pursue it.

So this helmet has to go.

This article is PR. TMS has more of a future.

[Red Moose]

Vagal Nerve Stimulation is OK but as it's invasive I would see it as not being as "good" as alternatives. The reason is it being publicised is because the technology already exists, the theory is decades old and it's a "chargeable" procedure. But it is invasive and as such carries more risks than ECT. It will make certain corporations a lot of money and undoubedtly will lead to a reversal to the macroscopic analogies of psychiatric illness of 50 years ago. It's crude, put it that way.

Possibly a better track is the TMS - Transcranial Magnetic Ultrasound. This is non-invasive and uses magnetic and electrical principles to achieve the neurogenesis seen in ECT which is the best treatment for certain types of depression. It's cheaper and quicker and has none of the risks of ECT which are primarily those associated with a general anaesthesia.

So VNS will lead down a path of the cingulotomies of the past with a GA to implant and complications of that. GA causes enough of the ECT problems like memory loss and disorientation. It will however make procedural money and insurance companies love procedures. Vagal Nerve Stimulation is more invasive and drastic than ECT. The article quotes one of them saying the opposite.

TMS is non-invasive, carries none of the related side-effects of General Anaesthetic (used in ECT and Vagal Nerve Stimulation). It is misleading in this article to suppose that ECT is more "drastic". VNS = corporate money + risk of neurosurgery. TMS = better results for patient with less side effects.

Surgical intervention such as anterior cingulotomy have only been found succesful in very rare cases.

Related device: The Orgasmatron

[FleaPlus]

This reminds me a little bit of an article I read a little while back on a spinal cord stimulation device which has been dubbed the "Orgasmatron."

Article link

Snippet:

While Dr. Stuart Meloy was working on a new device to treat chronic pain, he was surprised to discover it could also bring pleasure to his female patients.

While Meloy, an anesthesiologist and pain specialist in Winston-Salem, was putting an electrode into the spine of a female patient with chronic back pain, the woman reported a decrease in her pain and a delightful, but very unexpected, side effect.

"When we turned on the power in this case, she let out a moan and began hyperventilating," Meloy said on ABC News' Good Morning America. "Of course we cut the power and I looked around the drapes and asked her what was going on. Once she caught her breath, she said 'you're gonna have to teach my husband how to do that!' "

Meloy soon realized he may have discovered a device that could help thousands of women who have trouble achieving orgasm.

"The device is the use of a pre-existing device called a spinal cord stimulator," he said. "Instead of treating chronic pain with the stimulator, we're treating orgasmic dysfunction," Meloy said.

In a surgical procedure done in his office, Meloy implants the electrodes from this device into the back of the patient, at the bottom part of the spinal cord. When the electrodes are stimulated with a remote control, the brain interprets the signal as an orgasm, he said. The device is about the size of a pacemaker and can be turned on and off with a handheld remote control.

Side Effects?

[lhaeh]

I've been on two antidepressant medications. They both made me an emotionless zombie.

What else will this do, other then 'cure' depression?

Re:Side Effects?

[Mark_MF-WN]

That happens a lot with some of the older SSRIs. Some of the newer ones are better about those side effects.

To be fair though, SSRIs have some of the mildest side effects of any psychotropic medications. I was on a tiny dose of a mild antipsychotic for three weeks; the end result was that I temporarily became sociopathically antisocial, I gained fifty pounds (and I wasn't exactly Tommy Tune to start with), and my liver had started failing. I'm STILL taking the weight off. Apparently people often die of heart disease after just a few years on an antipsychotic. Lame, huh?

Too many people are depressed

[SunFan]

While there are certainly people who are clearly depressed, most people I know who are on anti-depressants are perfectly normal. They mistake the occasional lack of motivation or bad day for depression, and it seems doctors love to write prescriptions for antidepressants with little or no questioning if they are needed (kickbacks?). My frame of comparison for "normal" is a person I know who is truly bipolar (it's unmistakable, and medication is necessary).

Re:Too many people are depressed

[curunir]

I completely agree that doctors are too quick to prescribe SSRIs. Quite often for milder cases of depression (like mine), a diet and exercise routine can work without all the risks/side effects of SSRIs. I now take 5-HTP (available at any drug store) and eat a more balanced diet and never really feel all that down anymore. Also, taking 5-HTP regularly has pretty much killed the sugar cravings I used to get all the time, so I've dropped a few pounds.

I have no doubt that for serious cases, SSRIs can be very effective, but they should be a last resort after milder treatments have failed.

And???

[DesScorp]

We've been making the world "less shitty" for centuries with every advance; improved medicine, housing, communications, and education. If people of 100 years ago had peered into the future and seen our world, they'd be amazed at the lengths we've traveled.

And yet we're more miserable than ever.

It's as if all of the things we go to buy at Circuit City to fill our empty holes are only making them deeper.

There is a possibility, however: perhaps it's that, with each advance, our imagination travels more and we're dissapointed with what we have. The people of the 1950's thought we'd all be flying across the world in Mach 3 airliners, and the people in the sixties and seventies thought we'd have colonized other planets by now.

So...are we spoiled? Is that it? Or is it that we're looking to the wrong things for happiness? I could make the argument that in these days of Hollywood, everyone thinks they should be rich and famous, and not everyone can be a star.

It is already being used for Parkinsons' Disease

[madstork2000]

My grandfather just had this done as a treatment for Parkinsons. He can no longer write nor drink out of a cup without a straw because of the trembling.

He had to have three surgeries total. Two were to implant the brain stimulators. One week they drilled the left side, the next week they drilled the right side. The third week they implanted the "pace maker / battery pack" into his back.

He has not yet had the device activated. The doctors make him wait about a month for the injuries from the surgeries to heal. They do test the implants immediately after the drilling and implants. In case you did not notice from the article it is a "Local' anethesia, which for those of you out there not paying attention, means they drill into your head while you are awake.

That part sucks big time, but it is needed because they count on feed-back from the patient to make sure the electrodes are placed properly within the brain.

Anyway, he has not yet had the device turned on for every day use. His healing period was delayed when he got pnuemonia. He is getting anxious to have the device activated. He said the other people who have had this procedure have greatly improved, almost immediately.

How it works for depression I don't know, but it is already being used for Parkinsons.

-MS2k

Feeling sad for those that are depressed...

[shpoffo]

I used to get depressed.... then I took a tough step to ruthlessly go over every aspect of my life & thought that touched me emotionally - and have had to get *really* honest with myself as well. The result: I'm much more functional today than I ever was because I came to understand the nature of where my depression came from and DEAL WITH IT HEAD ON. So many depressives I've met all have characteristic personality traits that indicate to me that they are in avoidance of being aware of certain aspects of themselves. You don't need drugs, people! You need to allow youselves to open up emotionally and challenge yourself. It's a hard road - you have to do it every day - at any instant you feel that internal twang try to pull you aside.

Good luck

.
-shpoffo

Re:Feeling sad for those that are depressed...

[rigau]

Yeah but that takes work! AND you even have to think!

I totally agree with you. What follows is my rant.

We live in a society where the central question has become: "What do I do so I don't have to think?" Of course we are reaching the point where people ask themselves: "What can someone else do so that I don't have to think."

Everyone wants a pill to fix their problems. "I have heart disease cause I eat too much fat. What can someone do for me?" And here come the pills. One for weight loss, one for thining the fat in your blood, one to make sure the other two don't interact detrimentally, etc..." If you eat crap you will feel like crap. Go out do some exercise and eat well. I'm sure that if you do those two your heart will be better and your liver will live to tell the story.

So you are depressed? Go to the analyst. Read some books. Think about the problems you have don't just avoid them like a pansy. All this mess comes from the weird Victorian England/ WASPy "Don't deal with the elephant in the room" mentality. Well that is just harmful and silly. We need to acceptthings ans deal with them. Grab a Freud, Jung, Lacan, Klein, Ferenczi, NLP, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bowlby, Horney, Kafka, or a Shakespeare book, etc... (I mixed in philosophy, literature, and psychoanalysis because depending on your issue any of them when used properly will help. Great literature is great because it deals with things that all human beings will have to deal with regardless of moment in history otherwise it is just a period piece.)

Re:Feeling sad for those that are depressed...

[mutterc]

Everyone wants a pill to fix their problems. ... So you are depressed? Go to the analyst. Read some books. ...

Actually, the preferred way to treat depression is to start out with medicine to "lift the cloud" as a temporary measure, then try to address the root causes with therapy (e.g. "Why are you depressed about the future, just because your livelihood is being stomped to death by greedy offshoring-driven corporations? Just get another livelihood!). If you get the root causes addressed, you then come down off the medicine.

This is needed because (from experience) once you get down into the depths of depression, you can shoot down pretty much any idea. ("Why bother trying to improve myself? We'll all be standing in soup-kitchen lines together in a couple of years..." "Why bother trying to fight the concentration of wealth / corporate power? They can just buy as many congressmen as they want...") In fact, that's what took me so long to start getting help - on good days it didn't seem like I needed it, and on bad days I found no reason to bother.

BTW, antidepressants don't make you artificially happy (if they did, they'd be abused, but there's no street market for them, despite easy availability).

Andrew Solomon, a respected author about depression, wrote a handful of tips in a book called "The Bush Survival Guide" (it has many short chapters, by different authors, with usually-positive tips on how to deal with the current government). One was "Recent research has shown that depressives tend to have a more accurate worldview than non-depressives. However, the same research shows that a more accurate worldview is not an advantage." That's research I'd love to read.

Re:Feeling sad for those that are depressed...

[Effexor]

Ok, nice rant. Not terribly informative or informed, but definitly a rant.

First off, why the assumption that people who are suffering from depression don't think. That they are hiding from the big scary reality under their beds.

I can only speak for myself here, unlike some of you who have the uncanny ability to know what others are thinking, but I do think. I think there for I am... I think you think so I'll give you the benifit of the doubt on the question of existence.

In fact there are times that I seem to think too much. Again I can't speak to what others are thinking, but when I can analize my reasons for doing things and others just shrug when asked why they did something stupid, mean or self-defeating I figure I am thinking as much or more than my generally happy friends and aquaintances.

As for the bit about everyone wanting a pill to fix things, you make it sound like anti-depressants are happy pills. When is the last time some dealer offered you an SSRI on the street? They don't make you happy. They make me fart, but thats not a marketable side-effect

Depression is not 'getting depressed'. I wish I could say I get depressed because that would imply that sometime in my life that I can remember I wasn't depressed. Everyone has shitty days, or weeks. Feeling crappy about crappy things is not depression. It can lead to depression but for most thats a temporary condition. Mom died? Find you're unhappy, moody, lost your appetite and don't want to get out of bed? Yes, you're probably depressed. Yes it will probably go away without medication. Therapy may help, but then again so will time.

However when pleasurable experiences give you no pleasure, when even a minor setback can send you into a mood which is negative completly out of proportion, or a major one can have no effect, when you lack the physical energy and the mental capacity to even seek out pleasure, forget happiness, it is not going to be helped by reading a little Nietzsche (though I must have missed reading his real cheery works.)

The happy pills you speak of don't make me happy. They don't even make me normal, though apparently they do for some people. They do however allow me to function enough to keep a job, go shopping, take care of my kids. This is something that for several years I was incapable of doing.

Anyway, as for your great advice, I did all that. In my teens. Didn't work. 20 years later I'm still depressed. But thanks for playing.

Re:Terminal Man

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

How the HELL is this a troll? Have any of you ever READ the damn book?

Re:Terminal Man

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

I don't even know how that would work. I don't shop at Amazon, I just googled for the book and grabbed a link.