A U.S. Senate Finance Committee report says a federal official approved a device to treat persistent depression against the advice of a scientific advisory committee. According to the Senate committee, the official overruled his scientific staff to approve the vagus nerve stimulator device, despite its not having been proved effective against depression in its only clinical trial.
As new figures show that mental ill-health is costing the UK almost £100 billion a year, evidence released today by the Mental Health Foundation and Sustain reveals that changes to the human diet in the last fifty years or so could be an important factor behind the major rise of mental ill-health in the UK.
Doctors at the University of Pennsylvania and elsewhere around the US are beginning to offer vagus nerve stimulation, a controversial and expensive new surgical implant, to patients suffering from treatment-resistant depression. While some patients swear by the device, critics point to the lack of clear scientific evidence that the $40,000 vagus nerve stimulation device alleviates depression at all.
The US Food and Drug Administration has indicated it will approve a patch for treating attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children, provided that the manufacturers agree to certain changes in how the ADHD patch will be labelled and agree to monitor the product once it is on the market.
Practitioners interested in the practice and process of online therapy can find a new paper on the topic available in our section dedicated to online training and development resources. Drawing on an evidence base of over 700,000 words of online counselling and therapy, the paper highlights several simple observations which, surprisingly, have not yet received significant exploration in the academic literature.
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