DEEP brain stimulation has long been psychiatry's black magic: stick electrodes into a region linked to mental illness, deliver rapid pulses of weak current, and voila! Crippling symptoms of depression, obsessive compulsive disorder and even substance abuse are eased.
Now brain imaging of people undergoing deep brain stimulation (DBS) to treat depression is revealing the mechanism behind these effects - and who it will and won't work on. The crucial discovery is that DBS seems to tune an array of brain regions, not just the area around the electrode.
This once fringe treatment is now creating a new view of mental illness as a condition affecting an interconnected network rather than arising from chemical imbalances in specific regions. "The brain works on a circuit board," says Helen Mayberg of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, whose team is ...
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