Treat mental illness with electricity marries old ideas, modern technology

Mental diseases such as obsessive-compulsive disorders, depression and dependence are notoriously difficult to treat and often do not respond to drugs. But a new wave of treatments that stimulates the brain with electricity promise on patients and in clinical trials. In this episode of the weekly conversation podcast, we are talking to three experts and a patient of the history of treatment of mental illness, how the new technology and a more in -depth understanding of the brain lead to better treatments and the management of neuroscience of mental illness.

You can listen to the full episode here.

It is not uncommon to hear people joking about how their “knock” makes them want to straighten a twisted image or clean a stain on a counter, but for people who really live with a serious obsessive-compulsive disorder, reality is anything but funny.

Moksha Patel is a doctor and professor at the University of Colorado and has a severe OCD. “The TOC was really taking control of my life. The most obvious of my symptoms was not to be able to use public toilets, a shower for an hour after using the toilets each time and using chemical cleaners on my skin and my mouth, “he said. After fighting for years, Patel was finally linked to Rachel Davis, a psychiatrist and researcher also at the University of Colorado. Davis suggested that he could be a good candidate for deep brain stimulation as a treatment for his OCD.

“Deep brain stimulation implies the implantation of electrodes in the deeper areas of the brain,” explains Davis. These electrodes are then transferred to the brain itself of small electric currents that a doctor and their patient try to adjust properly. As Davis explains, “fundamentally, we seek to find the parameters where the patient feels that his mood is better, their anxiety is less and they have more energy.”

Stimulation of the deep brain is working well for many patients and has not started to attract the attention of the general public over the past decade, but the ideas underlying this treatment are almost 60 years old. As Joseph Fins, neuroethicist and professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College explains, which is part of Cornell University in the United States, it all started with a Spanish neuroscientist named Jose Manuel Rodriguez Delgado in 1964. “He put a thing called The Stimceiver, a deep brain stimulator, in the brain of a loaded bull. An electric current controlled by radiofrequency, he was able to stop the bull on his traces.

Although this work has obtained Delgado on the first page of the New York Times, it came in the heels of a horrible era of mental health treatment which involved lobotomies, electroshock therapy and many other destructive interventions and deeply contrary to ethics. Thus, when the researchers began to discover drugs that could help people with mental illness, the ends says that “psychosurgy and these types of somatic therapies began to fall into disgrace and doctors have moved away from more physical intervention.”

While modern neurosciences made it possible to better understand the functioning of the brain and the stigma surrounding physical treatments has faded, deep brain stimulation obtained its second chance in the sun. And as technology has improved, researchers like Jacinta O’Shea, neuroscientist from Oxford University began to study a non -invasive technique to stimulate the brain with electricity, called transcranial magnetic stimulation.

“If you place a ferromagnetic coil on the scalp and pass an electric current rapidly evolving through this coil, it will induce an electric field which passes without pain through the skull and in the brain fabric below,” explains O’Shea. And as with deep brain stimulation, these electric fields can help people overcome mental health problems such as depression.

Researchers still do not know how much brain stimulation or the functioning of transcranial magnetic stimulation is deep, but with each new treatment, they learn more about the complicated world of the brain and take measures towards the treatments of tomorrow.

Listen to the full episode of the weekly conversation to find out more.

This episode was produced and written by Katie Flood and Daniel Merino, with a sound conception of Eloise Stevens. The executive producer was Gemma Ware. Our theme music is from Neeta Sarl.