Vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) therapy, a treatment recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration for treatment-resistant depression, produced a positive response in more than 25 percent of patients in a national, yearlong study led by UT Southwestern Medical Center psychiatrists.
Test your personality type, see how well you can identify emotions from facial expressions, and evaluate your tendency to take risks, with a series of fun internet-based tests provided at a new depression research website. If you’d like to participate even more, you can sign up as a volunteer and help depression researchers to explore the genetics and brain functions behind depression.
When some British doctors see a patient with mild to moderate depression or anxiety, they pull out their pads and prescribe a self-help book. Under a new program in more than a dozen counties across the United Kingdom, patients take the prescription to their local library, where they check out reserved titles such as “Overcoming Depression” and “The Feeling Good Handbook”.
Male doctors are far more likely to prescribe antidepressant medications as a first response to patients with mild or moderate depression than their female colleagues, according to a mental health charity. Female GPs are much more likely to believe that counselling is the most effective response, but are not much more likely to refer patients to it.
The US Food and Drug Administration has approved an electrical brain stimulator which delivers tiny shocks as a treatment for severe depression. A generator the size of a pocket watch is implanted into the chest, and wires snake up the neck to the vagus nerve, delivering tiny electric shocks through that nerve and into a region of the brain thought to play a role in mood.
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