Did anyone else see this? I got this from someone from a list where a lot of them are experimenting with magnetic cranial stim, (on themselves) actually their stuff is low current with specific waveform patterns, sounds like a better way to go. From the LA Times:
Research on Depression Focuses on Brain Circuitry
Experts are learning more about the linking of cranial regions as well as predicting which patients will respond to drugs.
At McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., brain researchers have hit upon what could become a new way to treat depression--blocking a brain chemical called dynorphin, the "evil cousin" of endorphin, which triggers the "runner's high."
At UCLA, psychiatrists have modified the standard EEG (or electroencephalogram) to predict which depressed patients will get better with drugs and which won't--weeks before the patients can detect any changes in mood.
At the University of Toronto, scientists are tracing the specific components of depression--sadness, distorted thinking, disturbed sleep--to separate, but linked, regions of the brain. In the process, they've found one key region in the "emotional brain," area 24a. If that's overactive, depressed people improve with drug therapy; if it's not, they won't. At Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, researchers are trying yet another approach--transcranial magnetic stimulation--that uses magnets placed on the scalp to stimulate the prefrontal lobes of the brain, which are often sluggish in depression.
Depression, in other words, is no longer believed to be a mere deficiency of key brain chemicals--norepinephrine, dopamine and, perhaps most important, serotonin. Today, brain researchers view this common illness, which strikes about 19 million Americans, as a malfunction of particular circuits. Those circuits connect the limbic system, or "emotional brain," with the prefrontal cortex, or "thinking brain," and the brain stem and hypothalamus, which control basic functions such as sleep, appetite and libido.
In truth, there never was much proof that depression was merely a serotonin deficiency. That was an inference from data showing that people who are aggressive or suicidal often have low serotonin, says Dr. Peter Whybrow, director of the neuropsychiatric institute at UCLA. And from data showing that if researchers deprived people of tryptophan, a substance from which the body makes serotonin, they quickly got very depressed.
But now, despite the obvious efficacy of serotonin-boosting drugs such as Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil, it's clear that when a person is depressed, there's a lot more going wrong in specific areas of the brain than just low levels of serotonin.
----
For the rest of the article see: http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-000101735dec24.column?coll=la%2Dnews%2dscience